


The Wilhelm Scream

by katharinewrites



Category: Little Mix (Band), One Direction (Band)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-06-29
Updated: 2013-09-18
Packaged: 2017-12-16 14:30:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 36,112
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/863081
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/katharinewrites/pseuds/katharinewrites
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is something completely different from me, inspired by <a href="http://1d-rarepairkink.livejournal.com/585.html?thread=6473#t6473">this prompt</a> by thediamondskies because cheating fics are my favorite thing to write apparently? Plus, Louis/Perrie is one of my favorite crack ships.</p><p>I've said I wouldn’t do the WIP boogie again but some of the events (!!!) happening in real time (!!!!) are inspiring this so here it goes.</p><p>Warnings for themes of cheating and regular old teen boy misogyny. Awesome.</p><p>Title from the James Blake song of the same name.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**_I._ **

**_Six months ago_ **

In moments before bed, after a day spent smiling in Zayn’s face, making their best go at being brothers in this extraordinary situation, Louis imagines draconian punishments for himself. He envisions waterboarding, cat o’ nine tails, racks, but more often than not, it is a uniformed firing squad.

If he is held in front of one, blindfolded, with a dozen rifles ready to turn him into tattered cheesecloth unless he admits when it all began, Louis thinks he might first make excuses. He will say it all got out of control so quickly that he couldn’t recall the timing. It isn’t far from the truth. But if he hears those rifles cocked, with a shutter of clicks that announce their impending discharge, Louis will recount it starting as early as January. Should the steel barrel of a rifle touch his temple, cold metal demanding exceptional specificity, he will trace it that Friday afternoon. 

It starts after the band has run through the set list for the second time, when two of their managers call Zayn away from his microphone stand, into a private area of the rehearsal space with that serious tone they reserve for truly grim reprimands. Louis wonders what it could be this time. 

Among them is Alex, their public relations manager, dressed in board shorts and flip-flops despite the January chill. Alex is a former dilettante, forced by his wealthy parents at the ripe, old age of thirty to find a real job, or else his inheritance would be turned over to charity. Managing a boy band was his logical response. It came from the same place of subtle rebellion that had him wear his hair long, live in plaid shirts, practice yoga like it was competitive sport and eat as vegan as possible. He swore to his anyone who would listen that a terrible accident of birth had caused him to be English instead of a beach-bronzed Californian. Despite his nouveau-hippie exterior, Alex’s quick temper and profane mouth are legendary. It is never a good sign when Alex shows up unannounced. 

“Oooooh,” the others call after Zayn, as he walks away. They’re no better than schoolchildren eagerly taunting a naughty classmate’s detention, even if they’re not sure of the why or how. In kid world and in One Direction world the singling out, with its quiet promise of scolding, always denotes guiltiness. 

Louis is used to those talks, particularly after he has said something in public that shoots his foot directly into his mouth, despite their months of media training. He would endure directives to shape up, or as Alex favors saying, “Cut that fuckery out.” Louis is almost surprised that they haven’t come for him. Instead, they address Zayn with bowed heads, expressions in the uncomfortable middle ground between concern and sympathy, expressions usually employed for delivering news that a relation has died. 

“Whatcha suppose they’re telling him?” he asks the rest of the lads, eyes still focused on the proceedings. Zayn has moved from passively listening to actively participating in the conversation, talking in short bursts when he isn’t vigorously shaking his beanie-clad head. 

“Who knows,” Harry tells him, the only one to answer. He is too wrapped up in a game he has been playing on his mobile for the past week to bother looking up. 

Louis rolls his eyes, looks between Liam and Niall for any insights but they’re both engaged in an exchange that is too jokey to interrupt with serious worries about Zayn.

So Louis keeps his eyes on Zayn, looking for any shedding clues in his body language or expression but finds nothing conclusive enough. Anything that he strains himself to hear is drowned out by the band’s instrumentals. 

Zayn returns to them a little while later. His eyes are dazed and sightless, like he should be in the middle of a muddy, war-trenched field, contemplating his own mortality amidst his shellshock. Alex and their other managers see themselves out, without any goodbyes to the rest of them. Louis’ concern grows. 

“That’s odd that they didn’t come for you,” Liam quips, clamping a hand on Louis’ shoulder.

“You’re all right?” Louis asks Zayn, shrugging Liam’s hand off. 

“Yeah, what was that about?” Niall chimes in. 

Zayn doesn’t let on that hears them and moves toward the slumped pile of their coats, deflated arms reaching in all directions. Zayn slips the carton of cigarettes out of his coat and into his tracksuit bottoms’ pocket. It’s so quickly executed that it looks like a sleight of hands. Then he strides out of the rehearsal studio, already perching a cigarette and lighting up even though both feet aren’t through the exit yet. Louis guesses whatever it is, has to be a catastrophe.

 

 

 

Louis doesn’t press him until rehearsal ends, not out of any honorable motives to give Zayn space, but because it’s been impossible to corner him. Since practice resumed, Zayn has been on his phone at every short break they have had, texting and making phone calls. He hasn’t stopped looking like he’s been run over by a truck, though Louis has tirelessly hammed it up for the last hour to get a hint of life back into his face. He reasons with himself that if Zayn doesn’t snap out of it, or at least tell him what’s going on soon, he’ll go to Alex himself. 

“I’ll follow you home, if you don’t tell me what the fuck’s up,” Louis says, as they finally leave rehearsal and step into the cool London air. They walk to the van that will take them all—all except Harry—to their respective homes. Harry chose to drive on his own, gone to meet Nick, Louis supposes. Zayn had hung behind, pretending to look for something that wasn’t lost, allowing Niall and Liam head to the vans first. Louis had puttered about in an effort to look like he wasn’t staying just to confront him, though they had both known it was a ruse. Zayn had been forced to stop pretending soon after, and let Louis begin his interrogation.   

“I’ll eat all your food and cuddle you while you sleep. Whatever it takes, just so you know,” he goes on. 

Zayn glares at him and Louis is ready to make more lofty threats but something changes in Zayn’s demeanor, his face softens. Louis thinks perhaps the threat was effective and tucked it away to use again later, the next time he needs Zayn to open up—he knows there will be a next time. 

“I’m fucked,” Zayn says, reaching for a cigarette, though they are a few steps away from the van.

“Why’s that?” he asks, staying Zayn’s hand from pulling out his lighter. 

Zayn doesn’t answer at first, and puts the cigarette on his lip. 

“Well on with it,” Louis says, exasperated by the continued mysteriousness. 

Zayn stops walking and sighs, his breath a thin white cloud in front of his lips. Louis stops with him, catching their reflection on the van’s tinted windows in his periphery. 

“Some story is about to come out, yeah?” he says, gritting out each word around the cigarette. “About me.”

“I’ll let you tell me when we get to the part where I should be worried,” Louis says.   

Zayn puts his hand on his head, and anxiously readjusts his beanie. He pulls out the cigarette, pinching it between his forefinger and thumb. 

“About me fucking some bitch who claims she has proof. Alex and all of them wanted to know if I knew what that proof could be.”   

“Wow, mate,” Louis says, the dictionary of words he has known all of his life fleeing leaving him with those two useless ones.  

Zayn’s face is stony when he repeats, “I’m fucked.” Then he crosses in front of Louis, slides open the door and climbs into the back of the van. He crosses his arms when he sits down next to Niall and looks out the window. Louis steps in after him, drops down next to Liam, knowing the conversation is over for now. 

Louis can’t—doesn’t—judge. He feels all too lucky that the Polish girl in Barcelona hadn’t been an opportunist. They had had a quick tryst, one that barely lasted longer than one of their songs because he was so drunk, desperate and horny. She barely spoke enough English for anything other than the quickest sexual coordinates, but she had a bizarre fascination with English profanity. She repeated all the dirty words she seemed to know, amusing herself by screaming “motherfucker” over and over, while Louis slammed himself inside of her and tried his best not to embarrass himself by coming too quickly. 

He chalked it up to it being on the right side of their ascending fame, just before it got too crazy. Sheer luck, had helped too; she hadn’t been looking for a souvenir of the experience. All that surrounded him, now, were the odd rumor that he could easily brush off him like an errant crumb. 

As the van barrels through the streets, taking long routes to each of their homes that ward off fans, he imagines what would have happened if Eleanor had found out. Her pretty face might have crumpled in tears, or even worse, how she might have coldly and methodically erased him from her life. Maybe she wouldn’t have let him explain; if there was anything he could explain to her, beyond, “My hand wasn’t enough anymore.” If she had stayed with him, her family would look at him like a time-bomb, waiting for the next transgression, to shake their heads and mumble I-told-you-so’s, while she stoically defended her choice to stay with him.   

He thinks how that might all happen to Perrie, how it might dim some of her brightness, and feels sadness for his friend—his friends—twist into his heart. 

Then Louis reaches over and pinches the side of Liam’s neck for distraction, making him grunt and frown brutishly, because the thoughts get too heavy.

 

 

 

The proof is worse than imagined though Louis supposes that a picture of the girl, actually impaled on Zayn's cock, might have been a fair bit worse. They are bad enough, for what they are, grainy, camera phone-grade pictures of Zayn sleeping topless, his back turned away in one with his hair matted down to his skull with sweat from a fresh fuck. They are horribly incriminating, and impossible to ignore, his tattoos the trumpeting evidence that this isn’t a remarkable lookalike. 

Louis had taken one look at them and texted Zayn, joking that perhaps a camera had finally found angles that didn’t entirely flatter him. He rounded out the message with a sincere wish that he was all right and to let Louis know if he needed anything. 

Louis hadn't received anything in response, but hadn't been surprised. He wouldn’t expect anyone to have the time to check in, if they had to put out the same kind of fires. 

When Zayn walks into rehearsal that Monday morning, looking like a scruffy vision of death, no one says anything. Liam turns in his chair, looks as though he is about to lean over and whisper something, but thinks better of it, and waits like the others. It’s the only tactic that have agreed upon, though they’ve never said the words; they sit back and give him a perimeter Zayn has the devil raging inside of him. 

Harry is the only one of them who doesn't completely ignore Zayn. He watches Zayn with interest, like he’s poised for the moment when Zayn will finally emerge. 

Despite the wintery reticence, it's business as usual. Neither Zayn nor any of their managers say anything, Zayn’s anxious phone checking and foot tapping, the only suggestion that things are amiss. By the end of the day, Zayn has even managed to laugh at a joke that Harry makes, though it’s a laugh that’s distanced from the action, like he's watching everything unfold on a television show, he doesn’t quite enjoy. 

At the end of rehearsal, Zayn zips out of the room, phone clutched to his ear leaving what sounds to be the peculiar monologue of a voicemail. It starts out with a, “Babe, listen to me…” but he’s gone before Louis hears the rest.

"Do you suppose one of us should go after him?" Harry asks, as the others move toward their coats, and rescue their belongings from the pile. 

One of their tour managers shrugs and says, "Alex says he's working on it and he’ll be fine." 

"Yeah, they're handling it," Louis reassures Harry, glad the first acknowledgment of the fiasco is something for the better.  

Harry glances at the door again, looks like he’s chasing the ghost of Zayn’s presence, and Louis sees something forlorn in that look that he can’t place.

“Why’re you so upset? She isn’t your girlfriend.” 

“I like her,” Harry tells him, with the same robotic intonation of a hostage.

Louis is about to call attention to it, question the conviction behind those words, but he is stopped when memories of her presence flit into his head, a fond bit of intangible loveliness. 

“I like her, too,” Louis says. “She’s a great.”   

Harry nods curtly at him, as mechanically executed as his words. Louis thinks the way that he sees her and how Harry sees her are two parallel lines on a highway, they will chase from one arena to the next, one solid, and the other fragmented.

 

 

 

When Zayn announces he is going to Perrie’s show, days after their own tour has started, as they are on the bus, about to pull into a hotel, Louis thinks, “That’s nice.” Then he goes back to contemplating his plans for that night’s break. Similarly, the others barely acknowledge what Zayn’s said. Harry keeps napping, his head cradled on Liam’s lap; Niall keeps staring at his computer scrolling through increasingly vulgar Twitter DMs from girls who’ve attached pictures of themselves half-naked to set the mood, from what Louis can see from over his shoulder. 

Louis had been in the middle of determining how many bottles of vodka and rum from the minibar he could tear through to get him decently pissed before Eleanor calls tonight for quickly muttered, obscene fantasies and heavy breathing over their phones, while she is away in her own hotel room, kilometers away at some distant relative’s wedding. He figures he will need at least four, so he’ll need to start around an hour before she phones him.  

He is looking forward to her voice on the line tonight. He is feeling confident that he can rope her into sending him a few pictures and let his mind, along with the porn he’ll play in the background, do the rest. It wouldn’t be until much later—she had insisted the ceremony was a late one. Maybe he would take Liam up on that offer of dicking around with a few video games until it was time to make excuses to go back to his room and ring Eleanor. 

They had all been all expecting Zayn to spend the night with Perrie, anyway—it was the first night that their tours had coincided in close-by cities. Louis knows that if it had been him, he would have jumped at the opportunity. It’s been six days and he is already getting bored with the long-distance charade, already convincing Eleanor to schedule countless trips that will meet him at different points along the tour. 

But then, Louis looks up and sees Zayn’s face, the worried set of his brow, the dour way he holds his jaw, and he sees all his artfully crafted plans fly away from him. This will be more than the boyfriendly duties of seeing his girlfriend’s nearby gig, this is something partly orchestrated by Alex for a press release to be given to a couple of pre-authorized gossip outfits. 

“I’ll come, too. If you want the company,” Louis says, before he finishes estimating the timing of it all. But he’s safe, the show should be over and done with long before the call is supposed to start. 

“Cool,” Zayn said, the four letters, barely masking a relieved whoosh of air that exits his lungs. 

“Yeah. Maybe we can steal their dance moves for our show tomorrow.” 

Zayn grins, though his eyes are trying their best to give him an “oh-you” look. 

“You should really come too,” Louis says, casting an accusatory finger at Niall. “If I see you do that shit move where you fling your arms up more time…” 

Niall turns away from his computer, looking profoundly offended. “You don’t like my moves? How dare you.” 

He gets up and proceeds to shake his arms and crotch in Louis’ direction, hips pumping, arms swinging in front when his hips go back. 

“You do need some new ones,” Liam agrees. “Those are tired.” 

Niall’s mouth drops open with his mock shock and he shimmies and sways to Liam, gyrating so hard in front of him that he nearly goes careening into Harry’s sleeping face when the bus turns into the hotel parking lot. Liam starts laughing, his rumbling body shaking Harry awake. 

“You need less of that, more of this,” Louis says, popping up, and consciously shifting his hips from side to side. 

“Like this?” Niall asks, his efforts barely duplicating Louis’.

“Not really,” Harry says, wiping the sleep out of his eyes. “Try it more like this.” 

Soon enough, Harry stands, and offers a crossover step that ends in a shake and then all of them are bouncing and jiggling and swaying in the bus’ music-less living room. Even Zayn is swaying a little like an idiot and Louis can’t help feeling like he’s done a good job making him feel like it will all be all right, as they dance with the hotel sign, brightly illuminated outside of the window.

 

 

 

They’re taken to the venue ten minutes after Little Mix has hit the stage, to minimize being seen by fans and causing a commotion before their set. Though it’s a mutually beneficial public relations move, Alex had said the girls’ managers weren’t about to let their presence take away from the show, especially after all the attempts they had made in recent months to separate Little Mix from the lads, to establish their own identity. 

Louis is vaguely aware that Zayn made an impromptu trip to see her, not long after the photos were published because of pictures he had seen of them online. It was like this with Zayn, when it all went to shit, the lads having to look to outside sources to get any information, as non-forthcoming as Zayn is. The trip had been catalogued in a few gossip magazines, telescope lens catching what looked like an apologetic reunion in a car that Louis had to click out of as soon as they’d loaded. They had Alex’s signature all over them, privately public, imperfectly calculated to show them both in the best light possible. Louis expects more of the same tonight. 

“No fucking funny business,” Alex shouts over the bhangra music, when they go to check in with him, in his hotel room, before heading to the show. “Go, get a few happy pictures taken with the girls, and get right the fuck out.” 

“None at all,” Louis promises, coughing a little at the incense Alex had lit. Alex never wastes time personalizing his lodgings with candles, soft lantern lighting and Nag Champa.

Alex shoots him a look. “Don’t fucking think I don’t know who the fuck I’m sending. I’m still having you watched like goddamn hawks.” 

Louis puts on his best angelic face, the picture of wide-eyed, closed-mouthed obedience, and slings an arm around Zayn’s shoulder. “We would never try anything.” 

Zayn nods and thumbs up.

Alex raises an eyebrow in pointed disbelief and goes back to flipping through a book as big as a bible. Louis slants his head toward his shoulder to get a better look at the cover. 

“Does that really say, ‘How to Repurpose Your Pet’s Hair’?”

“Get the fuck out,” Alex growls. 

They are ushered to seats in the VIP area, tucked away from the rest of the audience. It's a smaller venue, the size of as some of the ones Louis remembers playing on last year's tour, when the demand for them was less overwhelming. But the girls are great, and play like it’s the O2 arena, Louis and Zayn, take turns complimenting the girls performances trading, "she murdered that note," "mate, did you hear that? Sick!" Zayn is so attentive to Perrie whenever her turn to sing comes that Louis sometimes feels like he's watching a moment too private for comfort. By the time their set is over, Louis feels just as exhilarated as he can tell they feel by the way they float off stage.

Zayn's phone goes off twenty after the lights come up, as they wait around for the girls to finish their post show wrap-up, take pictures with a few of the venue owners and debrief with their managers. 

"She says we can head back. They're in their dressing rooms now," Zayn says, looking up from Perrie's text.  

"Cool," Louis says. 

"You don't have to stay. I'm going home with her tonight, you could get back to the hotel." 

"I want to see her. Haven't seen her in ages," he insists. 

Zayn nods, and they move toward the door, signaling to their bodyguard where they’re going. Louis instinctively puts his hands on Zayn’s shoulders to prevent them from folding over to his torso with every heavy step he makes toward her.

 

 

 

It pains Louis to admit to himself that he should have taken Zayn’s advice, because it would mean that he was right. He hates when others are right. An hour later, they are still in the girls’ dressing rooms waiting for Perrie to emerge from her dressing room so he can say “Hello,” before racing back to the hotel to attend to his increasingly hardening cock. 

Every time his phone buzzes it’s a nightmare and a dream. Eleanor has sent text after text, each more suggestive than the one before. He struggles to keep himself from texting her _Now ?? Seriously ??_ because he doesn’t want her to stop, not when this kind of thing is so rare. So, he checks his messages with one eye shut, while he readjusts himself in his seat to hide their effect on his lower half. 

He loves that sex with Eleanor is prim. It is what attracted him to her in the first place, that secret little smile and how prim she was, and all the grotesque poses he wanted to put her into. He still feels like the boy from the wrong side of the tracks who wooed the pretty rich girl, like some perverse real-life retelling of Disney fairy tale. It was always so nice when he found a shocking new place to touch her, new way to place his tongue that had her momentarily forget herself and cry out, still barely a chirp, but louder than normal. 

But every so often, the primness gets boring, and manifests itself in his need to watch, engage in filthier things, degrading things. Sometimes, he will set up some of the creepiest things he can find on their hotel television, ordering from the embarrassingly named porn channels, or projecting the videos he’s culled from lonely nights on the road from his laptop, to play in the background of their sessions. While she’s fucking him like an angel he can watch some unnamed, disembodied pussy, get ruined like a sinner. 

He can tell Eleanor has had a bit to drink because alcohol makes her indulge him, and then he’ll spend the week afterward hating that he’s ever unsatisfied with her. Her first text had been a sweet attempt at dirty talk, something along the lines of missing his dick. The next few texts detail how she bad she wants it, what positions she wants it, getting less coherent as he imagines the alcohol works through her system. He holds back from texting a desperate, “Keep going.” When she gets like this, he lets her take charge, doesn’t want his clammy-hand need shying her away from going further. 

Then his phone lights up with a selfie she’s taken, in what looks like the pale fluorescence of a bathroom, pulling at the shoulder strap of her dress as she bites her lip and Louis has got to leave immediately. 

“Is she seriously still getting dressed?” Louis asks, incredulously, pocketing his phone. “She texted Zayn forever ago.”

“Yeah,” Jade says, shrugging.

The girls sit across from Zayn and Louis, a picture of solidarity with tight expressions and crossed arms and legs, while their makeup artists and hairstylists touch up a lipstick here, readjust a curl there. They had all changed from their performance outfits, into clothes hand-chosen for the publicity photos. Louis is convinced Perrie’s outfit to be impossible to get into, with the amount of time she has been in her dressing room. In the corner, one of the girls’ managers confirms their lodging arrangements for the night. 

"Told you to go back," Zayn says, sensing Louis' agitation. 

“You’re welcome to chill out,” Leigh-Anne says, the first words to leave her pursed lips since they’d arrived backstage. If the other girls had had chilly greetings for Louis and Zayn, Leigh-Anne’s was arctic. "She'll come out when she's ready." 

“You could try knocking on her door again,” Jesy says, diplomatically. Hatchi barks his canine agreement, from his spot on Jesy’s lap. He shifts and pads around in her lap before sitting back down much to the chagrin of one of their handlers who can’t brush the dog hairs off of Jesy’s skirt fast enough. 

“Do you really think he’s dying to see her? I’m sure any other blonde will do,” Leigh-Anne snaps out. 

Zayn bristles but says nothing to defend himself. She isn’t completely wrong. Since they came into the room, Zayn hasn’t made any attempt to see her, situating himself in a chair and making passing glances at her dressing room door. Louis’ phone buzzes in his pocket again and if he doesn’t get the fuck out of here, he will go completely mental. 

“She’s in the one around the corner?” he asks, indicating the farthest room from where they sit. A plan begins to materialize in his head. 

With Jesy’s verifying nod, Louis pulls Zayn’s arm, yanking him out of the chair.

“Can we borrow him?” he asks Jesy, gesturing to Hatchi. Zayn opens his arms to the dog who goes into them willingly before Jesy can answer. 

At her door, Louis looks at Zayn, gestures for him to knock on the door which he does, after a moment’s hesitation. 

“Babe,” Zayn says. “You done yet?”

"Just a minute more!" she yells from the room. 

Louis rolls his eyes and knocks on Perrie's door. "Perrie, babe, leave the long getting ready bouts to boyfriend, yeah?" 

His pant leg buzzes again and he checks it, missing whatever excuse Perrie is giving them. When he sees Eleanor’s _Call you soon_ xx another swell of impatience mixed with lust nearly knocks the wind out of him. He has to go. 

“Perrie,” Louis says. “Zayn’s dying out here. You have to come out now.” 

Louis elbows him. Zayn looks at him strangely before catching on and starts mimicking choking noises. “Do you hear him? Dying!” 

Zayn makes a particularly striking gasp at that moment that has Louis frowning and nodding at his authenticity. 

“Yep, okay,” she calls back. “I just need another minute.” 

“Hatchi’s run away,” he says, not missing a beat. 

He doesn’t hear her say anything. “I mean it, we didn’t want to worry you but we’re all out here looking for him!” 

It unfolds in comically slow motion, how Perrie emerges, topless, pert breasts high, light pink nipples erect in the chill of the dressing room, desperately searching their faces. She looks close to tears but when he looks closer he realizes eyes aren’t damp, though her irises have the red etchings and hash marks of blood vessels, like the tears had started and stopped long before this lie. 

She seems to notices Zayn’s face first, her eyes shooting to his arms where Hatchi is enfolded, safe and sound. Her face goes from relief to a sexy lip-curved invitation when her eyes move back to Zayn’s, and it goes straight to Louis’ groin. It’s a private moment that Louis knows he shouldn’t be witnessing, let alone affected by, but there she is and there’s a dusting of freckles between her tits, and he can’t look away, or stop the way his eyes widen in response, trying to take it all in. 

Her blood-curdling scream lets him know she has finally noticed him, along with Zayn’s “Shit, mate!” as he slips into the room after Perrie. Louis is left with a slamming door in his face, feeling strangely deprived though his phone buzzes with another text.

 

 

 

The other girls had come running when they hear Perrie’s scream, Leigh-Anne looking especially bloodthirsty. 

“What happened?” they ask in near-unison. 

Louis sighs and leans against the wall, next to the door and glances at his phone again. Eleanor hasn't called yet, but he expects any minute now she's ring him and he'll have to make explain where he is, hold out hope that by the time he gets home, she's not too tired to fuck. 

“Nothing. Normal stuff, got her tits out in front of me accidentally. The usual,” Louis starts. 

He explains it all to them after their simultaneous exclamation of “WHAT?” Jade ends up calling him a dickhead, while Jesy smacks him. Louis can’t say he disagrees with Jade’s estimation.   

In the lull before Zayn and a fully-clothed Perrie emerge, Louis looks at Eleanor’s last text.

_Feel in g tired babe. I love you so much xx._

_Hang on another twenty, love,_ he texts back, ignoring the sign off in hers. 

Louis is determined to act like he hasn’t just seen her tits so he’s full of flippant remarks about waiting so long until he realizes he’s been talking, in essence, to himself. 

“This isn’t awkward is it?” he asks.

“’s a wee bit embarrassing,” she admits, sheepishly. 

Louis can’t stand any moments that are pregnant with awkwardness. It’s compulsive the way he has to find a way to cut through it, make everyone laugh the self-consciousness away. 

“Oh, fine. It’s only right, yeah, love?” he says, pulling up his shirt and exposing his chest. He hangs his head in mock shame. 

“Puberty left me behind, I suppose,” he goes on, mourning his imaginary, underdeveloped bosom. 

Perrie laughs, gums appearing, and Louis knows that the awkwardness has passed. 

“Come on then,” she says and holds her arms out to him. “I smell like shit though. You’re warned.” 

He lets his shirt back down and moves into her arms, closes his own around her small, slight frame. However long her freshening up process was, it had included an application of something faintly vanilla scented. It mingled with the muskiness of her sweat into an all-together uniquely pleasant smell despite her protestations. 

“You smell better than I do at the end of a show,” he says. 

“Thank you for the flowers,” she whispers in his ear.

It takes him a second to remember the bouquet of flowers he picked out two days after the photos surfaced in The Sun. He hadn’t known what to do in this kind of situation, exactly, what allegiances he had and if they mattered now. He wasn’t a stranger to his friends getting caught getting their dicks wet in strange pussy, but he had never been friends with their girlfriends too. Louis felt doing nothing, saying nothing, would have been too complicit in Zayn’s deeds, so he’d picked out a set of sunny colored flowers, specially delivered, as the best show of solidarity that he could imagine. 

“Mhm,” he hums back, simply and lets her go. 

Their manager holds out a phone, gestures the girls and boys together, and they stand with their arms around each other, holding smiles that lie about better times than these. Afterward, another one dictates, a tweet: “Say, ‘Look who came to visit us,’ and end it with a winky face. Make it Jade’s tweet.” 

“I have to go,” Louis starts. He hasn’t heard his phone again since Eleanor told him she was tired and fears she’s already passed out.

“Yeah, the van’s outside and you’ll go back with Paul,” Zayn confirms. 

“That’s the plan. Unless you’re coming back with me,” Louis says. 

Zayn looks at Perrie a second, checking in, and Louis is sad for him that he even has to do this, no foregone conclusions in their relationship anymore. 

She smiles at him brightly. “Stay,” she says.  

Zayn smiles too, his back straightening at the confirmation, and Louis says his hasty goodbyes with thoughts of Eleanor’s naked body benevolently repressing images of Perrie’s.

 

 

 

The dark void of his hotel room adds to Louis’ shit mood, stormier still now that he has nothing to look forward to tonight, other than the palm of his right hand and a fake girl faking her enjoyment, instead of Eleanor’s very real pictures and soft groaning on the phone. 

_Sleep,_ she kept writing back to his texts that had assured her he was on his way back if she would hang on. By the time they turned off the exit, toward their hotel, her texts had stopped coming completely and Louis was sure she was passed out in bed, the fabric of her dress pooling out around her.

He slams the door, and goes for the remote before he takes off his jacket. He can type in the code to access the available videos without even having to consult the hotel’s television guide. They have stayed at this particular chain so often, Louis has the string of numbers memorized. 

He flips through the offerings, the typical TEEN CREAMPIE WHORES, REVENGE CAM SLUTS, but nothing calls out to him, nothing interests his cock, barely at half-mast at this point with all the disappointment. 

Louis thinks better of it and shuts it off without selecting anything, too annoyed for a cursory jerk off. He strips off his clothes and crawls into bed, his last thoughts of how he can get Eleanor to make those texts a regular occurrence.

 

 

 

He awakens the next morning with his cock so hard he can feel its echoed throbbing in all of his appendages.  He fights through the twists and tangles of his sheets, freeing his hand.

“Fucking hell,” he moans, as he tries to slide his hand down his waist and snags on yet another unanticipated twist of the fabric. He uses his other hand to slash through the sheet, pull it off of him. The sheet twists again, blocking his hand once more and if he hadn’t been so desperate to get off and ready to light the sheets on fire, he might have marveled at how his sleeping had weaved the sheets this way.

With one angry yank, more powerful than he knew he had reserves for this early in the morning, Louis pulls the sheets entirely from his body. His cock lays hard against his body, terribly red and shiny with wetness at the head. Louis grabs himself, thumbing some of the moisture down his shaft, then started stroking himself. He chases the wisps of the dream he had before waking, the dream that had him fighting to the surface of consciousness so he could act on it before he came in sheets. 

She is still playing with them, tweaking them in between his fingers while he fucks into her, their small weights bouncing up and down, fingers slightly losing their place, with every thrust. 

“Let me,” he had been huffing into ear, trying to push away her hands. She paid him no attention, twisting her nipples, eyes closed, the base of her head digging into the mattress and tilting her chin upwards. 

“Please,” Louis huffed again, breaking his rhythm. “Let me.” 

Her blue eyes open, hands stayed, at their momentarily ceased fucking. “What?”

He pushes her legs down from where they had been gripping his shoulders, readjusts his body so that he gets a better angle and tilts his hips to fucking into her again as his mouth makes contact with that pale pink nipple. She immediately bucks against his mouth, clipping her hips against him at the sensation. 

He tongues her nipple with the utmost care, tracing the edges with his tongue around, then laterally. 

“Harder,” she grunts, resting a hand at the base of his head. 

His dick twitches at the command. He proceeds, a little less carefully, lightly scrapes his teeth against the hardened tips. 

“Please. Harder,” she says again, whining last syllable out. 

He’s nearly biting her when she says, “Yeah, yeah, like that, yeah,” like a quiet prayer that he will never stop. He moves his head to her other breast, giving it the same devoted 

He’s pumping against her without end and he can’t hold on any longer. With his mouth clamped against her, he does his best to get his hand down where they’re joined and make quick suggestions of strokes that will get her over the edge before he goes. 

He feels her body go tight, every inch squeezing tight and then she gives a little moan before she’s coming. He feels himself following immediately after, pulls out so he can steady himself over her. He's barely out when of her when he starts coming, barely able to hover his cock over her tits and spilling onto them as he groans out a nonsense stream of sounds. He fists the last of it out his cock before he collapses on her, shaking from the exertion.   

“He can't find out about this,” she says, ruffling the hairs near his ear. 

“Who?” Louis asks as he rolls over, finally gets a chance to look her in the face, beneath the grey hair.

“Zayn.”

Louis’ eyes flip open, tugging him out of the fantasy, but his horror’s not enough to prevent his orgasm from punching a hot wave of pleasure out of him that sends come flying onto his chest. His breath comes out in awful gasps, like he’s been resuscitated from drowning at the bottom of the sea, lungs trying to get used to oxygen again.   

The dream wasn’t supposed to be about Perrie. 


	2. Chapter 2

**_II._ **

In most of Louis’ daydreams, the firing squad offs him after that first admission, leaving him flopping on the ground, trying unsuccessfully to stop up one of the many holes in his torso as his existence bleeds out of him. It’s a punishable offense, coveting someone else’s someone. In real life, he is fast asleep, in the repose of the corpse that he imagines himself to be. 

But if he is having an especially tough time sleeping, if the creaks of the hotel settling in for the night, or the hum of the tour bus engine, are too distracting, an enterprising soldier uses the butt of his rifle to jab Louis sharply in the ribs. It sends him grunting and stepping back, with his hands shielding any other blows, and he’s forced to let the rest of it fall from his lips. 

Yet it doesn’t stop him from trying to blame something else.

Louis swears it isn’t entirely his fault, as he stares into the white nothingness of the blindfold. When there are no further strikes, he’ll chronicle his remitting-relapsing case of Taking It Too Far syndrome—abbreviated TIT-EFF, as the drunken friend who’d dubbed the syndrome said, spittle flying—like it’s a medical aberration that makes him such an idiot. Because, yeah, he admits that he routinely takes things further than they should go when he’s bored. 

He’ll hold back from saying that it’s even more extreme when he feels slighted. He lashes out, so hard and so fast, it’s like he’s blacked out. Then as he comes back to himself, he finds himself he’s staring at a face whose glassy, dazed expression and shadowy lower lash line tell him all he needs to know about his words’ effects. There’s usually a sense in victory in it, unless he’s gone off and done it to someone he cares about. Then it’s a series of nervous, pride-swallowing machinations to make amends. 

So he’ll say this thing with Perrie is just a symptom of the syndrome. It’s at this point, when another rifle breaks silence and whacks him on the back of his head. His knees buckle to the dirt ground—it’s always dusty, dirty ground in these dreams—and collapse face-forward breathing in whatever dust he’s just kicked up. 

“It was the texts too,” he says, lips grazing pebbles and sand. The cold barrel taps his nose, a solemn encouragement to go on. 

If seeing Perrie’s beautiful, little tits was the planted seed, the texts were the water that helped it grow. He had nearly forgotten about them. 

In the beginning, they are innocent. The first occurs during a shopping trip on vacation in Dubai before the Take Me Home tour started again.   

“What do you think of this?” Eleanor asks, holding out a black shirt with sheer, gauzy sleeves and a swirling lace design about the neckline. She holds it up to her chest, so he can better judge how it would look on her.

He wrinkles his nose. “A bit busy, but it’s fine,” he tells her. 

She considers it another moment, and then replaces it on the hook, drawn to another shirt behind it. Louis shifts the dozen or so shirts that he picked out earlier, regards them again to determine if they’re worth trying on. If he had it his way, he would drop them on the register and throw his credit card on top of the pile and walk out of the store, but Eleanor is a more discerning shopper. From the set of her hips and arms, she considers finding the perfect garment a task that requires the utmost scrutiny and perseverance through mediocrity. So, Louis waits, tries to call upon reserves of patience and offers opinions when asked. 

He hears the beginning of the song and doesn’t immediately place it, too wrapped up in figuring out whether or not he really needs this complicated button down. Then he’s humming along to it absently and singing a few lines to himself, as he examines the clothes into both of his arms, because he knows this song, but how…

“Wings?” he asks aloud. Its existence, here, in this store a world away from home, perplexes him.

Eleanor looks up, visibly listens for the length of a lyric and nods. She goes back to scanning the rack as Louis smiles. He’s happy for the girls, the way the rest of the lads would be happy for them. It’s been a long time coming, and despite their hard work, it hasn’t been the linear rocket to success quite like his. 

He reaches for his phone, touches a few screens to get Perrie’s number pulled up and types. 

_In dubai Heard wings here congrats. Dont let it get to your head :)_  

It isn’t until they’re almost done at the register an hour later, as Louis signs the receipt and Eleanor collects their bags, when his phone buzzes. 

_whATTTT?!?!??_ He scarcely presses reply before another message comes through. 

_DUBAI?? What!!!! Can’t believe it!!_

He smiles at the text, reliving a wave of the punch-drunk elation he’d felt the first time he and the lads heard the places “What Makes You Beautiful” had reached, exotic locales Louis barely remembered existing from geography classes. Their managers had insisted it was only the beginning. Eight months later they were playing Madison Square Garden, fighting back a mixture of emotions at all they’ve accomplished. 

_You’ve made it babe x_ he types, glad to break the news to her.

_!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! :) :) :) :) :)_   

He smiles reading his phone, the text conjuring up images of Perrie, twirling about at the news, leaving a happy, glittering trail in her wake. She has that affect on others, injecting a shot of color when they’re nothing but monochromatic listlessness. 

“Are you done yet?” Eleanor asks, lightly amused though there's something else in her tone that makes Louis look up.  

As he looks at her, he slowly realizes he’s kept them standing in the store as he has been on his phone. Their items wait on the counter, as the cashier gives him the bored look, wondering what’s taking so long.

“Yeah. Let’s go,” he says as he grabs Eleanor’s hand and uses his other hand to take their shopping bags.

A lone paparazzi, likely a plant by Alex, snaps pictures of them as they leave the boutique.

Louis puts up the bag to shield his face and Eleanor’s from the camera. Behind the green plastic bag, littered, with logos he is still smiling about Perrie.

 

 

 

Three weeks later, his phone buzzes, as Louis is four, jackhammering thrusts away from losing it in between Eleanor’s legs, on a bed in an Ireland hotel. Beads of sweat, spurred by his movement, meander down his back, bump into other and combine to make larger traveling beads, as his rhythm unravels with every ascending stroke. 

Eleanor hisses, and Louis pushes himself to the hilt harder. He gives her his last pumps and comes, collapsing into the crook of her neck where whorls of hair tickle his nostrils. 

He grabs his phone off the nightstand when the notification finally registers with him, after he has rolled off Eleanor and feels the heat from their fucking start to dissipate into the air. 

_Fancied a bit of a change._

_Be honest, what do u think?_ Comes the second text. 

His orgasm-addled brain is still foggy in the areas that house reason and coherence; he barely deduces what Perrie is talking about when he looks at the picture. Eleanor rolls off from the bed, pads to the bathroom, and he’s momentarily too distracted by the way her naked ass squeezes as she shifts her weight from side to side to concentrate on crafting a text message. 

But he finally catches her meaning after Eleanor disappears into the bathroom, a strip of light under the door illuminating a small patch of the floor, momentarily preceding the sounds of pee hitting the water. 

_Suits you. What’s with the face ??_

It more than suits her. It’s a muted pink that transitions to vibrant fuchsia at the ends, that makes up the strands of her hair, unnaturally divine in how it warms her skin, showcases her eyes. Save for the silly pursed lips, she looks gorgeous. 

_Thank you !! wasn’t sure about it_ she writes back.

Though she is adventurous with the hues she puts in her hair, always slightly modified from the last time he has seen her, she hasn’t been sure of the last few changes. But that was his doing. He recalls, for the millionth time, the night he had a little too much to drink and told her he couldn’t take her comebacks seriously with that stupid neon hair. It had been a silly bout of teasing and she said something that got under his skin, though he couldn’t recall what it was now. Then his TITF syndrome was surfacing again, making him nasty, that Perrie bite her bottom lip in response to hold back the hurt. Since then, he had become something of her coif consultant. He wishes he could take it back, that he could have taken another sip of his drink to quell himself instead. He didn’t think it would be the source of a complex and hates that he created it. 

_Seriously what’s with the face ?? :)_ he asks again. 

“Who’s that?” Eleanor asks on the tail end of a yawn, standing a foot from the bed. 

“No one,” he says, before he’s had a chance to think about it. The lie falls so easily from his mouth that he believes it. He sets the phone, face down, on the bed stand, pats the bed for her to get in. 

His phone buzzes again and Louis fights an urge to check it, even as Eleanor straddles him, flicking her hips against him, in a subtle request for another round. He suspects it’s the trick of the shitty light but when he enters Eleanor again, he swears the ends of her hair look pink-tinged.

 

 

 

A month later, _Do you know where he is ?_ makes his phone flash in his darkened hotel room. It interrupts a movie he had been watching, right at the climactic high-speed chase the plot spent ninety minutes building toward.

Louis hits the pause button, freezing the hero’s car in mid-jump across a bascule bridge, and looks at the message. He wants to text back that he has no idea who Perrie’s talking about, so he won’t answer with half-truths. But he knows exactly who, and what, she’s referring to. A part of him anticipated this text the minute he saw Zayn type a set of numbers, discretely passed to him on a scrap of paper by their bodyguard, who had been conversing with the pretty bird at the concierge desk. 

_I thought he was in his room ?_

It’s not exactly a lie—lying to her even if it will spare her, would eat him up—but it’s a poorly thrown dart at the bulls-eye. Even if his suppositions are right, it isn’t his anvil to drop, and he won’t deal with the fall out. 

A minute later she responds. 

_We’re supposed to be Skyping now._  

Louis smirks as he types, _No wonder it’s been so quiet …_  

Perrie and Zayns’s Skype sessions are something of a joke among the boys, her moans so loud they can hear them radiating from Zayn’s laptop all the way in their rooms in the hotel. Zayn has never seemed phased by it, not the least bit embarrassed, not even when Harry had asked one day, “So, when Perrie was yelling, ‘Give it to me,’ the other day, was she talking about a shirt she wants to borrow?” Zayn had shot Harry a look but never issued an apology or mortified protests. He had clearly been pleased with himself that she made herself and their fucking heard. 

Louis doesn’t mind the noise, but in irrational moments he feels jealous. Eleanor had nearly gone scarlet from the tips of her toes to the ends of her baby hairs at the idea of being heard by the other boys, the night that Louis had laid back, completely still, with both hands behind his head and let her do all the work. Her frustrated grunts and sighs, as she worked had grown louder and once she got herself over the edge, her victorious cries filled the whole room—and whole floor from what the lads had told him. 

_Hah fuck you :)_ _._  

He should leave it there, put his phone down, and turn the movie back on. 

But he types, _You could while you wait for him ;)_. He hits send, shakes his head, and settles back into the pillows on his bed, uneasily. 

It isn’t as though he means it. It’s just part of their teasing and it’s likely she won’t acknowledge it anyway. She always ignores him when he says something slightly flirtatious, rolling her eyes as she says “Right okay.” So it surprises him when his phone lights up with another message from Perrie.

_Yeah whatve you got for me ?_  

Louis chooses his next words carefully.

_Cock long as my leg. Three arms an one extra tongue._

He thinks of adding in another arm, but stops before it becomes completely unbelievable.

_Oh whoa ! What would u even do with all that ?_

He laughs to himself and wonders how much farther he can push this for a laugh. He starts to type something that involves clowns and enemas but something has him tapping the delete button. 

_Lay you down. Push your knees to your ears get a taste_

He immediately regrets it once the little blue bar hits the right side entirely, signaling the text has been delivered. Millions of scenarios play out in his head, ones where she shows Zayn what he’s written and Zayn will flip out at him if he doesn’t give Louis the silent treatment; how there would be a rift in the band, sides chosen and battle lines drawn, that would ruin everything they worked so hard for. He starts to type _Kidding_ when Perrie writes back.

_Go on._

_Threesome with a clown. dash of scat if you’re up for it._

_Ha oh yeah that’s it, tell me more,_ and he knows she’s taking the piss as much as he is.

_That’s all love. Can’t give you more than you can handle._

_I could handle it :)_  

A second later, _If u see him tell him to call me :)_ _._

Louis puts his phone away, finally chastened, enough to do it. He likes to think that he has made her forget her worries for a second. Louis starts the movie again, tries not to identify with the hero’s flailing run, from the danger he can’t yet see.

 

 

 

_I can handle it_ reverbs in Louis’ head, as the credits roll twenty minutes later. His phone sits at his feet, subtly taunting him. His TITF started to rear its head in earnest as the movie’s hero escaped the Big Bad and all the action coasted to the resolution. Now with nothing else to do, with the emptiness of the hotel room bearing down on him, texting her again feels like the most logical step.   

_What’s if there weren’t any clowns available ?_

He figures she’ll have found Zayn now and she’ll be too busy touching herself to see the message. Louis tries not to think of it; he doesn’t want to imagine how she touches herself with Zayn on the other end because she’s his best mate’s bird. His mind goes there anywhere, sees her spread her legs, wet between them because Zayn’s said something that she likes.

_Then itd be just you and me_ interrupts his thoughts.It’s nicely noncommittal, a volley that lets him completely choose the course of this exchange.

_Yeah. Would be a bit weird._ He should stop here, he thinks. It’s still light enough that he could explain away anything should Zayn, or someone else happen upon these texts. But there isn’t a cure for TITF syndrome, just stabs at rehabilitation that don’t ever take.

_Would be weird for you to bend over. have your fanny out for just me_ he goes on, just to see how she reacts. He puts his phone down, gets out of bed and walks to the bathroom. Staring at his face, keeps him from freaking out when she doesn’t text back at first. The lighting turns his face into a mask of shadows. Has he always looked this tired? 

Distantly his phone buzzes. Louis feels breathless as he approaches it, and hesitates before he grabs it.

_A little too strange for you to spank me like that wouldn’t it haha_

It’s the haha at the end that undoes him. Is she still taking the piss? Is she serious but as scared as he is?Would she want that? Would she want him? Does she want him?

It takes him an eon to write back, _let’s stick to clowns for now_ , because he’s trying to keep his hands off his dick though his mind illustrates her text in graphic detail. He settles for scraping his hair to the side of his forehead, over and over, while he waits for her response. 

_Yes_  

Louis exhales, locks his phone again as he hears a door opening across the hall.   

His nerves are so tightly wound, he jumps at the sound, scanning the room like he’s been caught. There is extended murmuring outside his door that prompts him to look through the peephole and see that same hotel employee leaving Zayn’s room. She twists her mussed hair into a high bun as she goes down the hall. Zayn shuts his door, but not before turning his head to scowl at something. Louis twists his head, attempting to see what it is but the peephole’s periphery is too small. Then Harry walks by and he starts to wonders but his phone feels too heavy with guilt in his hand to wonder for long. 

Louis turns his back to the door, leans against it, thinking that Zayn will call Perrie now. He won’t make excuses for the wait and she won’t ask. Then she’ll say those things for Zayn that she’s only given Louis a taste of, so he can jerk himself dry and Louis will go back to staring at these never-ending credits. 

It’s the natural order of things; Louis doesn’t dare to ruin it, but it doesn't stop him from chucking his phone at the bed in frustration because he's finally chanced upon something this wealth and fame can't buy.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry about the wait. I went away on vacation and didn't have reliable access to the internet to post a new chapter. Hope it's worth the wait!

**_III._ **

One of the final days of vacation before the North American leg starts isn’t a real vacation, no matter how much Alex promises it will be a no pressure gathering. It will be work despite the nice clothes and endlessly flowing champagne, an industry party for the recording company. Most of the label’s other acts will be present, but the lads are the party’s crown jewel. They are a level to which all the other artists can aspire and an assertion of the label’s dominance in the current music landscape to their financial backers. 

Louis doesn’t mind industry parties as a rule. He usually ends up finding a group of people to entertain with dramatic snark, people who’ll at least laugh politely when his lines land. But these functions are Harry’s forte and Alex knows he can count on him to be charmingly fascinating to the people that matter. He doesn’t need to consult with him before these parties, but he does review the finer points of appropriate conversation with the rest of them at a meeting two days before. Alex spends extra time with Zayn because Perrie will be in attendance. He tells him just how to position himself when he stands next to her, and how he should hold her hand, that shows everyone he is reformed. As he watches Zayn struggle to hide his disinterest in participating, Louis is thankful that Eleanor is too busy with exams to make it, saving him from similar training. 

“Yeah, yeah, I got it man,” Zayn says, shrugging off Alex’s fourth demonstration of a seemly embrace. 

“Perfect. Now, don’t fuck it the fuck up,” Alex tells him. 

Zayn nods his head and waves his hand like he’s got it. 

“The rest of you cunts better be on your best behavior and slow off on the fucking drinks at first,” Alex warns them.

“Oh yeah, real proper behavior,” Niall promises.

They all respond with the kind of overcompensation that precedes a night ending in being corralled into the vans, at least one of them half-carried out of the party. Louis joins in the chorus of finger-crossed vows, fighting a self-satisfied smile.

 

  

Two hours after they’ve arrived at the party, after being primped within an inch of their lives, Louis is polishing off his fourth glass of red wine from a porky-faced executive’s personal vineyard. It tastes like shit though he knows a bottle is probably more expensive than his entire outfit. Louis smiles over the rim of his glass when he is asked how it tastes, but twists his nose and lips once the executive has turned away. Perrie catches him and frowns, mock reprimand in the finger she shakes at him. He’s inclined to take her finger and bite it playfully, so he supposes that for as awful as it tastes, the wine has been doing its job.

“Delicious, this,” Louis says to the executive, when he checks in again. His pleased smile let Louis know he’s inadvertently secured the label another filthy amount of money.  

The party hasn’t been as boring as he initially thought. Though they’re still preening for the right people, a confrontation over the hors d’oeurves had added life to the soiree. An executive’s leathery American wife had held up a photo of her husband and, from what Louis could see, another woman, gravely whispering, “Who is this fucking whore?” They had quickly removed themselves from the party to Louis’ dismay but the unsavory commotion had made the party loosen up. Even Alex had given up policing the boys’ moves and so they pay him back by getting unbearably drunk. 

Niall and Harry are glassy-eyed not long after, Harry regaling a group of geriatric executives in crisp suits with a story, while Niall makes ill-concealed eyes at a pretty redhead that has been announced as Syco’s newest signed artist. Liam is a better at hiding it but he’s in similar straits, his squinty grinning, at nothing in particular, the dead giveaway as he talks to Jade. 

On the other side of the room, Zayn and Perrie mingle accordingly, Zayn sipping wine while Perrie nurses what looks like seltzer to Louis’ eye. Both are on the outskirts of their respective bands, their little island whose borders need constant defending from outsiders. Whenever some new person goes up to them for a chat, Louis sees the nearly imperceptible sidle that Zayn makes toward her, while Perrie’s smile goes from dazzling to consciously blinding. They’re not unlike those animals Louis has seen on late-night nature shows that display to ward off predators. In that moment, he misses Eleanor. 

Louis shuffles over to them, his steps increasingly nonlinear because of the wine. 

“Any idea when we can leave?” he asks them, conspiratorially. 

“Never,” Perrie intones dramatically, then laughs. “You know we’ll be the last ones here. We don’t have anywhere to go.” 

“Yeah mate, they’ve set it to we’ll be here to talk to them all until they’re tired of us and leave,” Zayn adds. 

Louis nods; he knows. Alex had set up accommodations for all of the acts in the hotel that was hosting the event. It was a way to keep them from toppling out of entrances, noodle-limbed and stupid, for tabloid-fodder, as well as a way to keep them beholden to the label’s whims. 

Alex comes careening toward them, as though summoned by their discussion of his event planning. 

“I swear to goddamn fuck if you twats even answer that cunt on Twitter I will wear your skin as a cape while I hack your bodies up,” Alex snivels without preamble. He is doggedly scrolling through something on his phone. 

“And how are you tonight, Alex?” Louis asks. 

He can feel the frost emanating from Alex’s icy look.

“One of The Wanted twats said he wants to fight you in an interview. Don’t you cumshots dare fucking engage him,” Alex says, still scrolling through his phone madly. 

Louis rolls his eyes so hard he can see the bottom hairs of his eyebrows and waves Alex away. “We’re done now.” 

Zayn shakes his head. “Yeah. We’re done with those clowns.” 

Alex looks back and forth from both of their faces. “Where the fuck was this newfound fucking maturity a few weeks ago?” 

Louis and Zayn catch one another’s eyes, smirking because they know how to play this. “We’ve always been perfect gentlemen,” Louis says. 

He plucks at something that catches his eye on his jacket’s lapel, to maintain his confident posturing. On further examination, he realizes it is a hair. It flashes back pale violet and silvery when he holds it to the light. He peers down at Perrie’s hair, wonders how her hair has gotten onto him when it is up in that complicated, half-plaited style. 

“Yeah, I’ve got no idea what you’re talking about,” Zayn adds, feigning ignorance. 

Louis brings his hand, palm-side, up and nods his head as if to say, “See?” 

“Fucking pricks, the lot of you,” Alex grumbles as he walks away. 

“Love you more!” Louis calls after him.

“They’re such clowns, yeah, Louis?” Perrie asks, looking up at him.

Louis thinks he hears her emphasize “clown,” but her face is so neutral, her big, blue eyes innocently questioning the squint he levels at her. No, he is hearing what he wants to hear. He tips his glass to his lips. 

“Wonder if one of them’d be up for a threesome,” she says under her breath. Louis nearly chokes on the gulp of wine he has just taken. She is doing exactly what he thinks she’s doing.   

She is referencing the texts. 

“What?” Zayn asks.

“What’s that, babe?” she asks him back, eyes innocent. 

Louis sees the future in front of him, horrible and bloody. Perrie will bring up the texts like, “Have you got a moment, babe, to check this mess out,” and then the hors d’oeuvre debacle will seem like nothing more than a silly tiff over something mundane as parking. 

Or he could nip it in the bud, now. 

“Did you say you wanted to have a threesome with one of them?” he asks.

Perrie doesn’t answer at first. Her head tips up at him, unsure. 

“Zayn, what aren’t you doing for our poor girl?” 

He should stop here, let them have a laugh with him over it while Zayn shakes his head and gives him a friendly punch at how dickish he’s being. But there goes TITF syndrome, flaring up. 

“So which one, would you want to include, hmm? Would you—” 

“Any one of them,” Perrie says, her words cutting him off. “Unless you’d like to?” 

It’s Louis’ turn to stare down her very pointed look and wonder where she’ll take this. There is a taunt in the way her eyebrows bounce up as he looks at her. 

She changes her stance; confidently spreading her legs further apart, as far as her neon green dress allow her, arms akimbo. “What do you think, Louis? Why don’t you kick my legs up to my ears and have a bit of a taste?” 

Her voice is still bubbly and light but he hears a threat there. So his knockout punch comes, burning his throat on the way out. 

“Love, if it’s anything like what’s on offer above the belt, I’m going to decline.” 

“What the fuck is wrong with you the both of you?” Zayn asks, leaping to defend them from, well, each other as Perrie is saying, “Oh God, I’ll cry myself to sleep over that every night!” 

The wine glass feels light in Louis’ hand. “Right, well, I’m off for more,” he says, shaking the glass. Then he’s walking away, trying to replace all the daggers, quills and spines he’s sprouted at those imagined threats.

 

  

When Louis gets like this, woozy drunk and giggly, he usually relies on Eleanor to steer him around, his sense of direction gone and ne’er to return until the morning bringing a friend, the headache with it. But she’s not here so he meanders from one of the lads to the other. The last drink he’d gotten, his sixth or was it his seventh now, has sunken him so profoundly that all he can is hope that he doesn’t collide with any objects or worse, people. 

“Lost your way?” Liam asks him, after Louis spends a moment throwing some of the hors d’oeurves at him, with hideous aim. Liam catches what he can, pops his spoils into his mouth, while the rest, the cuts of exotic cheeses, meats and rolls, fall by his feet. Liam is too tipsy for his blocks to be effective and most of the food ends up in a pile on the floor by the time Louis has grown bored with the food fight. 

“Did you finally convince Jade to come to your room after this is over?” 

Liam’s lips part to a small smile. “No. She has a boyfriend.” 

“That would be a problem,” Louis admits. His gaze finds Zayn and Perrie across the way, Zayn’s fingers in the small of her back. “But honestly, is this over yet?” 

“I don’t think so,” Liam says after he’s done a turn-about, swaying in a circle to get a better feel of the party’s current status. He bumps into the table as he does it, making another roll fall to the floor. 

Liam’s right, the party seems to only have surged in attendance. More hanger-ons crowd around Harry, the party attraction that he is, with the same slack-jawed awe and wonder they would demonstrate in the face of a historical monument. It’s that second wave these parties get that Louis had hoped wouldn’t happen, the party reignited by bags of designer stimulants kept tucked away in suit pockets and expensive purses. 

“Fuck me, I’ll be back,” he says, feeling all of the wine he’s consumed flow down south at once. 

A few minutes later he’s trying to not to piss himself on the long line to the single occupancy toilets as he texts Eleanor random words, funny to him at least. _D ick_. Later, _ba lls !!_ She writes back with indulging _haha_ s and _Lol boobs x_ as the line shuffles slowly to the front. 

Perrie walks by notably Zayn-less with her arms linked through Jesy’s, chattering about something with each other, making their way down the line to line. He reaches for her as they go by, missing her arm entirely and pinching her side. 

“For God’s sake!” Perrie yelps, jumping away from his touch, nearly leaping onto Jesy’s back. When she realizes who grabbed her, her face softens. “Oh look who it is!” 

If she were alone he would try to talk about earlier, clear some of the air, but Jesy’s presence prohibits anything but vague niceties. He settles on looking back down the line; it stretches out twice as long than when he had first joined it. 

“Cut in front?” He motions to the space in front of him, behind a statuesque woman in a perfectly tailored suit. 

“What d’you think?” she asks Jesy. 

“Of course, this line’s freaking ridiculous!” she says, sliding in front of Louis without needing encouragement. “Thanks.” 

“It’s ridiculous how there aren’t enough toilets for a party this large,” Perrie notes.

“They do it on purpose, to keep the moneybags from spending the night in there getting high,” Jesy tells her. 

Perrie’s eyes magnify to twice their size, false lashes hitting her brows. “Really?” she nearly shrieks. 

Jesy nods matter-of-factly, prompting another “Really?” out of Perrie. Louis catches himself in time before he tells her that her shock at this party's questionable activities is adorable. There's still all that heaviness from earlier that he hasn't dealt with yet. 

The line shuffles up again, and they settle into a comfortable silence, checking their phones and making a bit of small talk that’s mostly about the girls’ hurting feet in those sky high heels. Louis barely follows it, the topsy-turvy movements of the room too fascinating to keep up. 

The wait seems like forever but the two single occupancy toilets are within sight. At the front, the line diverges into women and men. Jesy and Perrie move to the left, with the rest of the women on line and Louis starts to follow them before Perrie stops him. 

“Where are you going?” 

He doesn’t immediately see his error until Jesy points to the men’s line. With a laugh, he trips back over to join it. They’re moving up to the front, the girls going slightly faster than the men’s line, and it’s Jesy’s turn to get in. She exclaims, “Finally!” as she goes in and Louis wants to cheer but he’s feeling too sluggish to sequence an arm pump and a congratulatory “Yay!” 

The wall feels like a perfect resting place, so he slumps against it. Across the way, Perrie stares straight ahead. He has to squint one eye to keep her from floating away.   

“Sorry, love,” he calls to her.      

She turns and at first he isn’t sure that she heard him. “Huh? What was that? Would you like to rate my bum now?” 

She turns around and looks over her shoulder, giving him teasing bat of her eyelashes. “Well…?” 

“I’m sorry,” he starts, feeling a wave of bilious regret rush up his throat. It doesn’t come before the rush that goes straight to his dick when he thinks of her last text message, how she’d admitted she wanted him to spank her. “I didn’t mean…like….all that…you know.” 

He tries to say more but he’s too drunk and the words keep falling away faster than he can string them into sentences. He’s never been good at apologies, anyway. 

“I thought…you might’ve said….something? To him?” Louis goes on, pushing off from the wall, dragging himself over to her.

“I didn’t. Why would I?” she asks. 

“Good,” he says, putting an arm around her shoulder, falling into her. His weight sends her stepping back into the wall, Louis flushed against her.

“You’re so pissed,” she says, pushing against his chest to right him. 

“He’s one of my best mates. Brothers, you know.”

“I know. There’s nothing to tell him,” she says. “Look, you’re going to lose your place. You’re next in." 

Perrie walks him back over to the men’s line and Louis is thankful for the help; his feet feel like lead bricks that he is trudging through sand. She doesn’t go back to other line. “What about…?” 

“I’ll go after you,” she says, answering his unuttered question. She glances down at her chest. “These are so small anyway that I’m practically a boy anyway.” 

“They’re great. Perfection. The cat’s whiskers. Promise,” Louis says, more reassurances stumbling off his tongue. “I said I wouldn’t but I would. Promise.” 

He’s putting his hands up like he means to touch her tits but drops them the minute he realizes what he’s doing. He is crashing into the wall again. His knee jostles the man behind him who mutters a gruff, “Prick.” Then it’s Perrie’s turn to be pushed up against him, hands everywhere, locking her legs to keep him from going over once more. 

“Oh bless you, you’re going to make a mess in there aren’t you?” She pushes his chin up from his chest with her hand. 

On cue, Louis trips out of her grasp as the men’s toilet door opens. He barely makes it into the bathroom before he coats the urinal in vomit.

“We should get you upstairs,” he hears her say, distantly. He spews again as Perrie makes heartfelt apologies to the others in line.

 

 

There’s not much he remembers about the elevator trip upstairs other than repeating, “I’m sorry,” to Perrie, and going on about how her tits were actually lovely, while Zayn tried to reel him in. 

“Yep, she has a lovely set. You can stop, now.” 

Louis had grown panicked that Zayn was on to him now, but the doors opened and Zayn had guided him out with no trace of mistrust. 

Louis feels himself twirling toward the bed, banging a thigh, then a toe, then a wrist, into hotel furniture as he goes by. Zayn takes his right arm while Perrie takes his left and set him on a straighter course toward bed. He flops into it, face down, when they’re near-enough, shins and feet dangling off the edge. 

“Thanks mates, you’re legends,” he says, the pillow muffling every other syllable. 

Zayn had somehow got him standing upright at the toilet so he could empty his bladder and held him place so he could piss without spraying everything else. 

He hears Zayn laughing above him, hands trying to turn him over in the bed. With another pull, Louis is on his back as Zayn peers down at him good-naturedly. “You can’t fuck up the clothes. We’ve got to return them tomorrow, yeah?” 

He barely remembers Lou’s instructions when they were getting ready, where they were supposed to drop the clothes off in the morning to be returned to their respective designers but he can’t remember the rest. All he knows is that Zayn is pushing his jacket down his shoulders and his second set of hands are unbuttoning his shirt and— 

Louis’ head whips around to the owner of the extra hands.

“No, no, n-n-n-no,” he says, laughing because this is so horribly mad.

“Y-Y-Y-Yeah,” Perrie tells him, not breaking her hands’ quick movements. 

Louis can’t imagine much right now but he imagines getting hard because his best mate’s bird is undressing him can’t be good. The thought wrenches another set of giggles out of him. 

Perrie and Zayn’s team effort make short work of getting his top half undone and removed from his body. Her hands go for his belt and it’s a small mercy that Zayn brushes her hands away, indicates Louis’ shoes instead. He’ll hug Zayn for this in the morning. That is, if Zayn has anything to do with him in the morning. 

Louis shifts up off his hips long enough for Zayn to drag down his pants as Perrie pops both of his shoes off. They take them to a nearby chair for safekeeping. Louis thinks they’ll be gone now and he can succumb to sleep in peace, but their weights hit the bed one after another. 

“How likely do you think it is that Alex will kill him?” Perrie asks Zayn, like Louis isn’t there. 

“Likely? It’s an eventuality,” Zayn says. “I heard he got some on that vineyard bloke’s trousers when he was trying to leave.” 

Perrie giggles. “No!” 

“Deserved it,” Louis chimes in, the room finally settling into a more polite spin instead of its previous whirring. He takes the opportunity to sit up against the pillows. “Wine tasted like steamed rubbish.” 

Zayn and Perrie laugh together, the sounds harmonizing into something achingly sweet. 

“But you kept drinking it!” Perrie says, patting his leg playfully. It sparks where she touches him. 

Louis closes his eyes, shrugs himself deep into the pillows. 

“Speaking of piss,” Zayn starts, and thumbs toward the bathroom. The bed dips and rises a little too greatly for Louis’ sensitive stomach. He puts a hand over it to calm the burgeoning disquiet. 

Perrie looks at him fondly, puts a hand to his brow and pushes away some of his fringe that has come to hang over his eyes. “Feeling better?” 

“Yeah, think so.” 

“Poor thing,” Perrie says, smoothing his hair, and it’s so tender that he can’t bear it. The light and maybe a little of the drunkenness he’ll admit, impart a spectral glow about her, and shit has she always been so pretty? 

She leans down over him, with the same maternal expression that precedes a forehead kiss. As her face gets closer, he tilts his head at the last second. Her lips bang onto the bridge of his nose but his right arm goes up to help right the angle and before she pulls away he kisses her. 

It’s not his best move, he’s still overshot the center of her lips by a centimeter, but he catches the right side of her lips. His bottom lip nestles in, just under hers, top lip settling between hers, getting a little sticky with the lip stuff she’s got on and…he needs to stop. 

But. 

She is kissing him back. She kisses him even though he knows his mouth still tastes like vomit; even though he’s undressed and vulnerable in this bed; even though he’s a dick; even though the only thing keeping them from picking her up and setting her straddling his lap so he can grind against her pathetically is a door that will open any time now. 

Perrie presses her lips against him more forcefully, but he won’t open his mouth, he’ll spare her that particular horror. His hand wanders up and down the forearm she is using to support herself as she leans over. Her other hand slides down the side of his face, cups his cheek. It spurs him to make an urgent grope at her chest, and she isn’t wearing a bra so he feels the contours of her breasts all the more and fuck. So he moves his head down, puts his lips to her breast and tongues her nipple through her dress as Perrie makes a surprised gasp. 

The sound of the flushing toilet repels them, Perrie recoiling from him so forcefully that he puts an arm out to steady her lest she fall from the bed. There’s a telltale wet patch on her dress from his saliva and she folds her arms over it. She doesn’t say a word to him but all the questions he imagines she has for him, maybe for herself too, screw up her face. Then the door opens and Louis’ head turns away from her. 

“There he is!” he declares as Zayn exits the bathroom, flips the light off. 

Zayn puts his hands out, ironically attempting jazz hands with a requisite cheesy grin on his face while he walks to the bed. “Here I am!” he says, mimicking Louis’ delivery. 

Louis chances a glance over at Perrie but she gives nothing away. She’s turned to Zayn too, copying his jazz hands and making faces at him. 

“Time to leave you, yeah, mate?” Zayn says, once he’s finished the match with her, to see whose jazz hands devolve into the most silliness. From Perrie’s delighted laugh, Zayn has won this round.

 “Yeah,” Louis agrees. The recent display has only made him seem like more of an intruder than he already feels and the alcohol has made him ready to pass out. 

“You need to be tucked in?” Zayn asks him. 

“No, I’m cool. Unless you’ll tell me a bed time story, too?” 

“Once upon a time, there was a boy named Louis who was in a famous band. He was a good son, brother and friend. Then, his PR manager murdered him. The end.”

“That’s the saddest story,” Louis chuckles, with his eyes closed, as a wave of exhaustion pulls him under.

 

  

He’s awakened by his phone’s persistent ring, from his pants over on the chair, sometime during the sun’s ascent. He lurches out of bed, ready to chuck it out the window once he’s told the caller to fuck off, but the ID says “Beautiful” so he groans an, “I love you, beautiful,” as he answers it, instead.   

“From what Zayn and Perrie told me, I’m surprised you’re alive,” Eleanor says. 

“Told you what?” he asks, stopping in his tracks back to the bed.

“How you made a mess at the party.”

“Yeah,” he says, his voice thin after holding his breath for her answer. He pulls up one side of the sheets, slides back inside. “I definitely needed you.”

“You’ll see me tonight. Unless you’re too dead.” 

“No, I have to see you,” he says, smacking his lips together. They’re sticky. 

“Sounds serious,” Eleanor says, as Louis puts his fingers to mouth. They come away goopy, shimmery in the light where he holds them up for inspection. Then he remembers Perrie’s lip stuff and that fucked up kiss. 

“I miss you,” he says, rubbing his fingers to clear the substance. “I’m just leaving in a few days and I want to spend as much time as I can with you.” 

She mewls like a pampered cat at his saccharine words, no trace of suspicion to be heard, and it makes Louis feel worse. 

They hang up after making plans for that evening and Louis left with one hand to his temple in a feeble attempt to stave off the pounding in his skull, while the other rubs away the remnants of Perrie from his lips.

 

  

Alex doesn’t exactly murder him; he doesn’t say anything to him other than strings of expletives so passionate and imaginative they sound like poetry over the phone a few hours later. Louis takes it as he miserably nurses a cup of tea, concentrating on the tendrils of steam to quiet the way each word thumps against his skull. He had awoken for good ten minutes before Alex called, having fallen asleep again not long after Eleanor’s call. 

The panic he should have been feeling after the kiss had come crashing into him and he had nearly flung himself out of bed, eager to see Zayn and Perrie again and assess the situation. But he had been stopped by the noise from their room next door, Perrie’s steady whimpers and the sound of the bed knocking against the wall. He had gone to make himself tea, in the kitchenette, convinced that if the situation were truly dire, they wouldn’t be fucking like this.

Alex tires himself out, complains of needing to center his energies and promptly hangs up. 

“Arsehole,” Louis says, tapping his phone back to the home screen.

A new text message lays unread in his inbox, according to the superscript number.

_I won’t say anything if you won’t_ sent early this morning.

_Yep_ Louis types back, unsure of how he feels about this new, mendacious partnership with Perrie.

He sets the phone aside, lies back down. He thinks about Eleanor’s smile as the bed’s tapping radiates through his hung-over brain like fireworks.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was vaguely inspired by some of the gossip/pictures we got of the boys in Mexico, at the infamous tattoo parlor in Maryland and of Eleanor leaving a hotel alone in June. The rest is made-up garbage. Hope you enjoy :)

**IV.**

Louis is dead after that admission. Always. 

One mention of the kiss and the shots are fired, the force of the bullets entering his abdomen make his lead-littered intestines seep out of his body, and the end of his life is two gasping breaths away. He will spring out of bed when his sight goes black in the dream, his heart rate fluttering so intensely that he puts the heel of his hand over his chest and gulps down air. 

Except when the dream goes on.  

“What do you want from me?” he calls out to his executors. “What the fuck do you want from me?” 

Their silence is, as ever, the only answer. 

“Fuck you!” he heaves, words scraping his throat. “Fuck this!” 

A force on his neck knocks his head back, cold and smooth. It jabs at his Adam’s apple, makes him swallow dirt, dust and sweat. He gags at the taste. 

The side of the barrel keeps knocking against his neck, rhythmically, in a way that Louis thinks might say “Confess” over and over. 

He clears his throat, coughs out some of the dust he hasn’t swallowed. 

“America,” he moans. “It went to shit in America.”

 

 

 

Louis hears screaming girls everywhere in the States: when he’s in the shower, while he’s shitting, as he’s listening to music, when he’s pulling Eleanor’s legs apart. There always seems to be more of them on this side of the ocean and their high-pitched screams echo for hours as he completes the most mundane tasks. 

The North American tour is structured chaos, with fans that are ready to descend into madness at the smallest thing. The lads always lose it a bit here, fans’ madness rubbing off on them in vague ways. Leaving always feels like waking up out of a fever dream, recounting their actions on the plane to each other, with awe that it ever happened. 

"It's so hard to not get caught up in it," he imagines Zayn will tell him on the final flight out of the States, weeks from now. "You know how that place is." 

Louis will nod and say, "Yeah," like it's a random observation that is not directly related to Mexico and Zayn’s self-destructing heart.

 

 

 

It isn’t worth it to fuck fans anymore because of the inevitable disaster it becomes before the condom has been rolled on. They hardly trust people whose eyes glaze over when they claim they don’t know what One Direction is, either. Zayn’s drama was proof of that folly.   

Alex has set them up with escorts, instead, different women in different cities, tied to the same organization that is skilled in servicing clientele of this prominence. They are professional and confidential in their dealings, putting up with the labyrinthine paths to the boys’ hotel rooms unseen and the interminable security checks. In the cities with more permissive establishments, a selection of women were already waiting at the hotel, decorating it like fine art. It became a game for the boys to find them, betting on which beautiful women they encountered were professionals. Thus far, Harry was winning. 

Louis hadn’t partaken of the services though he had been tempted to on several occasions. He had even gotten so far as having one come into his room, but the guilt ate him up as she undid his trousers, so he sent her off. But not before she sucked him off. 

In Mexico City, there had been three of them, all wavy-haired brunettes, lounging by the hotel pool. He had noticed him after he and Zayn passed half an hour moving a joint between each other’s fingers while they made random comments and laughed. They had gone to Louis’ window, when the joint had burned out, and slid the curtains apart, revealing the pool and its courtyard. Harry had been reclining with Lou and Cal, blissed out like he hadn’t seen the sun in a millennium. Zayn had done an impression of Harry in repose that had made Louis choke on his spit while he laughed. 

Since the kiss Louis had been hyper aware of appearing normal around Zayn, though he kept ruining it by laughing too long at his jokes, being too willing to accommodate his fleeting moodiness, and making himself strangely scarce whenever Perrie called. For the first time, as they had looked out over the pool, Louis had felt like he and Zayn were back to normal again, bonding over smoke and half-formed thoughts that made them laugh anyway. 

“Those birds over there,” Louis says, pointing at the three of the women. “They must be them. Los Brunettes.” 

He says it again, relishing the word with his best Spanish accent though it sounds suspiciously Italian to his ears.  

They could have been sisters on holiday, if Louis glanced at them quickly. But on further inspection their appearances are slightly too immaculate for ordinary vacationing. One woman in a white one-piece—though with all the cut outs it’s unlikely it could be called a one piece—readjusts her sunglasses on her face. 

“You think they only speak Spanish?” Zayn asks. 

“Siiiiiiiii,” Louis drawls. He turns to squint at Zayn. “Why? You thinking of chatting one up?” 

“No, I’m just wondering,” Zayn says.

“Alex is paranoid. If they don’t speak English…better for him and us,” Louis says. 

The one in the white one-piece had just turned over in her large chair, revealing a perfectly sculpted ass that had Louis forget his place in the sentence, momentarily. 

“Yeah,” Zayn says and nods, looking very philosophical. 

“Pool now, then?” Louis asks. 

Zayn puts his hands up and frowns. “Not in the mood to sit and watch people swim, really.” 

In hindsight he thinks he should have seen that as the first indication Zayn would get in over his head again, but he was too high to be responsible for Zayn. 

“Okay then,” Louis says. He removes his clothes as he walks toward his luggage in search of a pair of swim trunks. 

Zayn leaves after Louis strips down completely, saying, “I’m going to pass, mate, on both things” when Louis thrusts at him just to be an idiot. 

A beeping sound from his laptop sidetracks Louis’ plans. FaceTime rings, a call from Eleanor, and when he answers, she’s standing stark naked in her room. 

“Were you expecting me?” Eleanor says, her face bent into the laptop, as she looks at Louis in his state of dishabille. 

“No…going swimming…but…yeah,” he says, gone stupid from her body. He never gets a chance to put on his trunks.

 

 

 

The next morning there is a message sent out to all of them to congregate in Alex’s room and Louis finds out Zayn has gone stupid, too. He can tell that it’s a major disaster because Alex has increased his incense burning to noxious levels and he has lit only four candles in the room, casting everyone and everything in shadows. The boys sit on the floor in front of Alex’s bed, while he is in it, his head bowed over a candle, like they’re his disciples. 

“Just give me one motherfucking moment more of peace right now,” Alex says when Liam asks about turning on the lights and opening the blinds. 

Zayn sits farthest from Alex, by the door, looking haunted and Louis can’t help feeling déjà vu. He sits by him, stepping over Harry’s outstretched legs. Harry is singing along to the chanting music, in a gibberish he makes up as he goes along. Niall tells him to shut up good-naturedly but he continue. 

“What’s this about?” Louis asks as Zayn he sits down. 

Zayn blinks slowly and shakes his head. The feeling of déjà vu intensifies. 

“You cunts are so much more trouble than you’re worth, my god,” Alex whines, dramatically. 

He takes a deep, cleansing breath and turns to Zayn. “Again? Really? Again?!” 

“What’s this about?” Harry asks, looking toward Zayn. 

“Zayn, why don’t you share with the goddamn class?” Alex says.

Zayn doesn’t say anything. He sits quietly, clenching his fists and relaxing them at regular intervals. “I didn’t close my blinds.”

“Okay…” Liam says. “Were you dancing naked in front of the window or something?” 

“He should have been,” Alex interjects. “It would have been less fucking stupid.” 

“Were you fucking someone?” Harry asks, his low voice making the words foreboding. Zayn hangs his head, while Harry’s points up toward the ceiling.

Louis cocks his own head to the side, putting it all together. “Los Brunettes? White swimsuit…?” 

Zayn’s silence is the only affirmation needed. 

Louis’ heart rate seems to slow down, to a normal, non-guilty pace for the first time around Zayn in the week since the hotel party, since he put his lips on Perrie’s. There’s an ugly part of him that feels pleased with this turn of events, though Louis would never admit it to anyone. It’s the part of him that still thinks about the texts and the kiss like they aren't the worst things he could have possibly done. 

“From the girls at the pool?” Niall asks. “Hey! I picked her out first. No wonder she took forever to come to my room.” 

“Why’s it such a big deal?” Louis asks. 

“Did the photographers catch, uh-you?” Harry asks.

“Yes,” Zayn tells him and bites down so Louis can see the small jump as his muscles work in his jaw. 

“So fucking astute today, Harry,” Alex says. He eyes him like he wants to say something further but doesn't.    

Harry stiffens. “Yeah. They…I saw them taking pictures of me earlier.” 

“Well one took photos of Zayn, too,” Alex says. He pulls his laptop from the bedside table behind him, picks up the screen, and shows them. 

As he scrolls, Louis sees grainy pictures of Zayn with a brunette whose face is turned away and too low in comparison to Zayn's body for the camera to capture. In the pictures only the top of her wavy brown hair is visible and Zayn is looking down, jaw agape, luxuriating in what must be her oral advances. In the final photo, Zayn’s head is thrown back, arms held out from his body, with his hands in what Louis assumes, if the camera angle had shown it, would be her hair. 

“Shit,” Liam says, voicing their collective reaction. 

“Those could be anyone,” Niall says, helpfully. 

Niall is right to some extent. The pictures are lower in quality than the pictures from January and they have been taken from an obscuring distance from a telescopic camera below his room. Zayn is in profile in most of them, tattoos mostly hidden from view in all but the last picture.  Louis thinks Alex could make a case for the photos being heavily edited, if they were to leak. There pictures give little to infer because only the very top of her head is visible. Alex might say Zayn was stretching and yawning after a nap and that bit of hair was a strange pleating of his trousers. 

“Yes,” Alex says, “but our shit-gurgling friend here has a history of this. The press’ll lap this shit up, regardless.” 

Louis’ solace at the outcome of this--that he will have something to throw back into Zayn’s face if he ever finds out about whatever it is with Perrie--is mitigated by his fears for Zayn’s reputation. 

“We’re burying these fuckers,” Alex says. “Some tabloids heard these might be floating around but they won’t fucking find them.” 

“Well, that’s great,” Louis says, trying to raise morale. 

Alex’s glare cleaves into his chest. “But we’re doing it at a price.” 

“What’s the price?” Zayn asks. He stares at Alex intently, like this answer holds his life in his hands. 

“A paparazzo’s meal-ticket for the year, but nothing you have to worry about, my beautiful shit for brains. Harry’ll pay your debts.” 

Louis isn't surprised by this solution. Harry is always the sacrificial lamb in these situations, called upon to provide a distraction. He turns to Zayn, watches the color flow back into his pallid face. Zayn sits up, straighter, fortified that Alex’s plans will help him this time around. 

“How?” Harry asks, sobered. 

“You’re going to be having lots of photo shoots in New York,” Alex starts. He sketches out some rough plans for what will happen, that Louis barely follows. 

“Can I think about it?” Harry asks. 

“What? This is your fucking forte! What do you need to think about?”

“I don’t know. I just want to think about it?” he says. “What do I get out of it this time?”

“You get to jerk off to your fucking fame, you goddamn twat,” Alex says, nostrils flaring. “I’ll give you a day to think about it, but your motherfucking answer will be ‘fuck yes, Alex.’” 

He claps his hands together. “Well, now that that’s been decided, you lot can get the fuck out so I can meditate. Wait. Zayn and Harry, you fuckers stay back for a minute.” 

Harry expands his eyebrows then knitting them back together repeatedly, working through whatever he needs to think about. Louis rolls his eyes at Harry’s dramatic consternation over something that barely involves him. 

As the rest of them walk out together, Louis hopes that his own thoughts, his satisfaction at this turn of events, aren’t written on his face. After the door shuts behind Liam, Niall puts his ear to the door. 

“Guys,” he whispers, putting his hand up to stay them from returning to their rooms. His eyes squint as he tries to hear what is going on behind Alex’s door. His jaw drops an instant later, allowing for ample inspection of his tongue and the back of his throat. 

“What is he telling them?” Liam asks, chuckling at the reaction. 

Niall looks at his shoes, as he moves from the door. “Nothing. Just Alex…threatening to kill them as usual…” 

“What did you really hear?” Louis asks. 

“That’s what I heard,” Niall says, eyes a million miles away.

“No, it’s not,” Louis says.

“It is,” Niall says, less convincingly than before. “You have powers to see into my brain now?”  

“No, just common sense.” 

Niall belly laughs like Louis has just said the funniest thing in the world. “You’re mental, mate!” 

Louis lets the whole thing drop, despite his growing curiosity. But whatever Niall has heard makes part of his glacial guilt break off and float away like an iceberg.

 

 

 

“I think I want a new tattoo,” Louis tells Zayn and Liam as they head into the hotel elevators, saddled down with overnight bags and their crushing fatigue. 

Zayn sighs. “Yeah?” 

“What of?” Liam asks.

Louis tries not to be offended Zayn’s lack of enthusiasm. He holds out his wrist and encircles it with his thumb and index finger. “Something round here, I think. Got some ideas.” 

Zayn looks at the spot quickly and gives his blessing of, “Cool.” 

Liam is more curious and asks him for a more detailed vision of his ideas. Louis mumbles a few broad ideas while he keeps an eye on Zayn. 

The one-word answers kill Louis. Zayn has been like this since Miami and Louis has started to worry that Perrie has dropped hints. But he would say something, wouldn’t he? 

He had hoped that the talk of tattoos would revitalize Zayn, at least have him speaking to Louis for longer periods than a distracted, passing comment on the here and now. Since landing in the States, Harry and Zayn had had clandestine meetings together. Louis hadn’t minded it at first but he hadn’t talked to Perrie since the kiss and he can’t gauge if he should be worried. 

“Was thinking of going tonight,” Louis says as the elevator doors open. 

Zayn steps out first. “Wait, tattoos?” he asks, as though he’s finally hearing conversation. 

“Yeah, you in?” 

Something passes over Zayn’s face. “Fuck yeah. Let’s do it tonight.” 

Louis smiles and turns to Liam. “What about you?” 

“Yeah, I’ll come watch,” he says. 

As they move to their rooms, staggered across the hall, Louis divulges details about the place he had been thinking of visiting. He’d spent an hours researching the best tattooists in the area, and found one not too far from their hotel. If they were ready soon, they could let their drivers know. 

“I’m ready to go whenever,” Zayn says, slipping his keycard in the slot. Louis almost wants to ask what’s prompted the about-face, but he chooses to revel in it instead. Zayn hasn’t been this excited about anything in a while. 

“Twenty minutes then,” Louis says. “You know what you’re going to get?” 

“Mmhmm,” Zayn says and disappears into his room. “Something for her.”

 

 

 

The tattoo parlor is wallpapered on one side with swirling designs by the artists, so colorful and winding they are a feast for Louis’ eyes. He’s tempted to choose something from the wall, but they’ve been given a huge portfolio of tattoos by each artist that they’ve just started going through, and he is sure something else will pop up. 

Zayn looks at the book with mild interest, but from the way he offers words of appreciation at the artistry, Louis knows that he’s firmly decided on something else. He hasn’t said what it is yet, despite Louis’ best attempts to wrestle it out of him. Liam has taken to looking over the book when he isn’t openly staring at the girl at the front desk, who eats a cup of ice cream in between her sprints to check on the autoclaves. She wears all black, tattoos winding up one arm, around her neck and down the other, in a pair of shorts so small that every time she gets up Louis can make out her pubic hair from her spot. 

“So what do you think of this?” he asks Zayn, pointing to a tattoo of a length of rope. It is part of a nameless person’s sleeve and winds around their forearm The detailing makes it so realistic that it looks as if the arm is tied by an unseen force. 

Zayn takes his time examining it. “It’s pretty sick, mate,” he says. 

It shouldbe the perfect opening for Zayn to reveal what he is going to get, but he goes back to silently perusing other examples. The anticipation nearly kills Louis. 

“So what are you going to do? For this tattoo?” Louis asks, tired of the unknon. “Her tits on your arm or something?” 

He inwardly flinches at bringing up her tits again. Zayn looks at him out of the corner of his eyes and Louis hopes that he hasn't put up a glaring sign over his head that says something is going on between the two of them. 

“No. But I am going to get her on my arm.” 

“Like, a portrait or something?”  Liam asks. He looks at Zayn like he’s grown an extra limb. 

“Yeah, something like that. Not a full-on copy but her,” he says.

Louis fights the muscles of his face to stop them from frowning. It sounds like a wretched idea, too romantic by half and a disaster if—when, he stops himself from thinking—they were to ever break up. 

He would never say any of it so he asks, “Any particular picture of her inspire it? Or just random?” 

Louis entertains visions of Zayn getting Perrie tattooed on himself in a sailor’s style, skimpy clothes and a provocative pose. He is not sure whether it would be torturous or hilarious or both. 

“Is she going to look like this?” Louis asks, sliding one hand to his hip, the other behind his cocked head. “A pin-up?” 

Liam laughs, prompting Louis to strike another come hither pose, daintily folding his hands over his crossed legs and arching his back. 

Zayn giggles. “No. More like these pictures.” 

He digs out his phone and scrolls them through a few personal pictures of Perrie that Zayn’s snapped, one of her in a crop top, flashing a bit of pale skin winking at him; one where she wears a beanie, bending over as she writes into a notebook, a shockingly quiet moment for her; and one that must have been taken before the kiss because he recognizes Perrie’s dress. She has put on Zayn’s suit jacket, and is in the middle of rolling the left sleeve with her forearm outstretched, looking at him with melancholy eyes. 

“Something like all of these,” Zayn says. He scrolls to one last picture, a drawing he has done that is a flattering caricatural rendering, combining the pictures they had just seen. 

Liam seems grateful when Louis reacts for him. 

“Have you gone mad?” Louis asks. 

“No,” Zayn says. His defensiveness makes the word sound more like a question. 

“Don’t those always end badly? And then you’re stuck with it?” Louis reasons. He is sure that these things are a curse, no matter how much the person says it will be different, like their relationship won't be like all those others.  

“Is this because of Mexico?” Liam asks. 

Zayn’s defensiveness amplifies trifold. “What? No, I’ve been wanting it forever.” 

“Then I think it’s cool,” Liam says. “It’s like mine.” He touches his arm, his five arrows. “Maybe we won’t be like this forever but it’s a souvenir.” 

“Yeah, yeah, exactly,” Zayn says, a few too many agreements to sound authentic. 

 “So I’m the only one who hasn’t lost his mind. Well then,” Louis says.

“Why do you care?” 

Zayn’s four words make the air whiz out of Louis’ lungs as quickly as a deflating balloon. He keeps giving himself away, lucky that Zayn hasn’t papered his brain with all of the clues and connected the constellation of dots. 

“I don’t give a fuck, frankly.” He can’t stop TITF syndrome from sending a surge of insolent words onto his lips. “It’s just interesting that you’d get this done so soon after sticking it in a prostitute.”

It is slyly eviscerating and Louis knows it. But it is the truth and Zayn knows it. Louis can tell because Zayn’s eyes narrow at him though he doesn’t speak a word. 

“But I mean, your skin, yeah?” he says, trying to cushion the blades in the last batch of syllables. 

“Yeah,” Zayn says, under his breath. 

“Excuse me, where did you get that?” Liam calls, stuttering on the first word. The front desk girl looks up, gestures with her ice cream. 

“This?” 

Liam nods. 

“Down the block.” 

“So, uh. What flavor did you get?” he asks. Louis smiles at Liam’s cautious flirting. 

She grins around her spoon, lips outlined with remnants of her purple lipstick that she hasn’t yet licked away.

“Rocky road.” 

“Oh.” 

Out of the corner of his eye, Louis sees Zayn drop his head and shake it. He is holding back a smile and Louis’ cheered that his words weren’t so awful that Zayn couldn’t enjoy a laugh at this painful display. 

“Smooth,” Louis teases. 

Liam follows up with a look that says he would love Louis to find the nearest sharp object and fuck himself with it. He squeezes his eyes and beams at him in return.

Liam stands up, and confirms, “Down the block? This way?” 

She points him in the opposite direction, her extended arm making part of the snake she has tattooed on it straighten. “There.” 

“Okay,” Liam says, awkwardly. He nods at them and heads off for ice cream. In that moment, Louis feels a little sad for him, this missed connection, when Liam’s still nursing fresh wounds. He considers running out after him, giving him a quick pep talk that will blame her for the uncomfortable exchange and applauds Liam’s mettle for even approaching her. But the artists come out for consultation, and Louis’ worries are shelved away like heavy tomes to be reopened, reconsidered, when the next insult occurs.

 

 

 

 

“Do you need me to stop for a minute?” the tattoo artist asks him. 

“No, why?” Louis asks. 

“Dude you’re hardcore grimacing, right now,” he says. “Need to catch your breath?”

Louis blinks and yes, his face does feel a bit sore like he’s been straining it for hours. He relaxes it, lips and cheeks falling into their neutral position. 

“Oh. Hadn’t noticed.” 

The tattoo artist says nothing, goes back to the pattern of guiding the needle across Louis’ skin, then wiping it down.

Truth told, he hasn’t noticed it or even the pain from the tattoo that always gives him a little buzz. He was too busy thinking of Zayn in the other room, getting Perrie inked onto his skin and all that it would change between them. 

It is petty to be so invested in this tattoo, he knows that much, but it reinforces their bond, draws lines in the sand that separate them as a unit and everyone else's superfluity. Then there are those expectations it will put on it, expectations for them to make it and it all makes his stomach squeeze to think of it.  

“Do you think that’s a good idea? My mate’s tattoo? Of his girlfriend?” Louis asks.

“We don’t judge tats, here, man. That’s not chill. We just do them,” he says. “Whatever people want I’m gonna do it. Even if they want a dick on the side of their face.” 

“Right but I mean some friendly advice? So they don’t completely cock up?”

“No.” His tone is final. Louis doesn’t dare say anything else. He keeps his concentration on his wrist while the artist wounds his skin with the pattern’s lines and curves.

 

 

 

“It’s sick,” Liam says, mumbling with a spoonful of ice cream in his mouth, when Zayn shows them. 

“Yeah?” Zayn shifts his arm from side to side, admiring the work. “He did do a sick job, yeah?” 

The artist modestly waves away the compliments. 

“It’s brilliant,” Louis says, sounding less hollow than he expects to. It’s not a full-on portrait, not an exact replica of Zayn's cartoon impression of her, but it is one that marries all of the pictures and the drawing. It’s sweet, it's cute and it erects the wall, with Louis as an outsider. 

“She’ll love it,” he says, spitting each word like broken glass, as Liam takes a picture with Zayn’s phone.

 

 

 

The ironic thing is she doesn’t. At least, behind Zayn’s back she doesn’t completely love it. She calls Louis about it two days later, as Eleanor is in the middle of telling him about the newest bit of abuse she’d suffered. 

“They’re mad, babe. A little girl came up to me at the airport and said she was going to murder me for keeping you two apart. I’d be terrified if she wasn’t practically an infant,” she says. She sits on the edge of his bed, readjusting her bra straps, and reaching for her top, that had been carelessly thrown to the floor earlier. She had arrived a few hours ago and Louis had barely let her set her bag down before he’d pounced on her. Their stomachs had finally grumbled enough to set them off, out of bed, in hopes of finding food. 

He shakes his head as he eases into trackpants. “You shouldn’t have to put up with that bullshit.”

His heart bleeds for her, it does, when he thinks of all the shit she tolerates for reasons he barely comprehends because he looks at himself in the mirror, and sees nothing worth the strife. 

“I know. They’re mental and it’s rubbing off on me,” she says, pulling her hair out from under her shirt. 

She starts to tell him something else but his phone buzzes. Perrie. 

“Wrong number,” he says as he answers it. Eleanor gives him a quizzical look. 

“Ha,” she says. “So I have you to blame for the tattoo, I hear.” 

“What?” Louis asks, exhaling deeply because it isn’t something more alarming, like she told Zayn or she was telling Zayn or fuck Zayn, she wanted to run away with Louis. 

“He said both of you and Liam were there. So I’m blaming you,” she says, airily.

Eleanor mouths, “Who?” 

Louis brushes her off as he says, “That was not my bloody fault. He’d made up his mind.”

“Yeah right. I bet you told him to do it. Couldn’t get me out your mind and dared him to do it.” She giggles and he laughs a little himself because it was startlingly accurate except for the tattoo. 

“Nah, I would have had him put it on his bum instead so he would always sit on your face,” he says. 

Eleanor mouths “Who?” again. She mimes a phone with one hand and points to it with the other.

“Yeah, that sounds about right,” Perrie says.

“So did you just ring me up to yell at me?” 

“Kind of…” she trails off.

“What?”

Eleanor gets up from the bed, stands in front of him and mouths “Who?” for the third time, irritation coloring her face. Louis can’t understand why he keeps brushing Eleanor off, evading mention who he’s talking to. But he does it again and she rolls her eyes. He moves out of the room, into the hallway, and takes a set of steps down, in an aimless quest to find somewhere private. 

“…and it’s strange, you know?” he hears Perrie say, missing the first part in the change of scenery. 

“What was that?” He stops at the first landing he reaches, one floor below the boys’ rooms. It is the recreation floor, the pool to one side of the hallway and the gym at the other. It is all abandoned now, past closing time for the other hotel patrons, but the band’s keycards grant them access after hours. 

“Are you listening to me?” she says, pretending to scold him, but he hears a tremor in her voice. 

“Yeah. Yeah now I am, love.” He decides on the gym, opening the door cautiously. The blinds are down over the windows and he hadn’t been able to see inside if Liam had been having a late evening work out. To his relief the gym is in stasis, the elliptical and stairmaster machines frozen in mid-step, while weight machine handles are suspended in air. Louis settles onto a bench by the free weights, tucked away from the door in case someone does come around later.   

Perrie pauses before she goes on. “Oh. I was just saying that the tat is…I don’t even know.”

“A big step? One that’s mildly idiotic?” he offers. 

She laughs. “Sort of. But it makes it a bit serious and I don’t…” 

Perrie doesn’t finish her thought, the silence going on long enough for him to think he has lost reception. 

“Yeah,” he tells her, letting her off the hook. “Yeah.” 

“Well, I’m off to sleep,” she says. 

“Yeah,” he says again, struck by the thought of Perrie in her bed, what she might be wearing to it. Would it be lacy, but sweetly pink, hitting her right at her hips and— 

“So early to bed?” he asks to say something that distracts himself. 

“It’s half past two here, Louis,” she whines. 

“Why are you calling me so late, love?” 

She doesn’t have an answer, so he goes on. “What, Zayn not satisfy you tonight?” 

“No, he did,” she says, giggling, “a couple of minutes before I called you.” 

Arousal hits him strongly as he thinks of her in bed, soaking those frilly pants through with come she’d just spent rubbing out of herself that all he can muster is a weak, “Oh?” His imagination might be playing with him but he swears her answering, “Yeah,” is a little tight-voiced. 

“But it was weird tonight,” she says. 

“How?” flies out of his mouth before he could trap it behind his teeth. 

She pauses. “It was really centered on me, I think…but I’m not complaining.” 

“Did you like that?”

“It was different.” 

Louis asks, “What’s it normally like?” and almost throws his phone at the opposing wall. He had been so impressed with himself, no rising at the back of his throat. Then this. 

Perrie hesitates and he thinks she won’t tell him. 

“More romantic, I guess. It’s different for him.” 

“Oh so you want more love-making and sweet touches and ravishing kisses,” he says, saccharinely. He is close to vomiting in his lap, but it distracts him from his burgeoning erection. He sighs wistfully like an innocent girl, imagining her first time. 

“God no!” Perrie protests, before he can go on with more purple metaphors. “I said it was different, not that I love it.” 

“So you don’t want a romantic fuck?”

“Not all the time. Whatever,” she says. 

It should be the end, now. He looks at the clock across the wall, hanging behind the three treadmills. Ten minutes have passed since he sat down on this bench; just enough time to return to Eleanor without having to fully explain his whereabouts or why he had left. 

“You never said what it was normally like,” he says, TITF syndrome stretching out of its slumber, lighting up the neuronal pathways for these stupid words to spill out of his mouth, right on time.   

“I think, like, we have sex like we’re showing off for each other,” she says, each word carefully uttered. “Like, he’ll try some things on me and I try some things on him.”

 _What can you do? How do you make him feel? How does he make you feel?_ Questions scroll through Louis’ mind like a news ticker. 

“What things do you try--” Louis asks, but he stops himself. “Showing off?” 

“Yeah. Like, remember, I can do this. Or look what I’m making you feel or something. I don’t know, like, I’ll let him come in my face and I make it hot for him and just go ‘yeah, babe.’” She gives him a taste of the way she would say the word, high-pitched and breathy. “Or he’ll try out something ridiclous with his hands on me. I don’t know.” 

Louis takes a long, deep breath, breathing in the musty, sweat-heavy air of the gym, but it does little to stop his juddering heart. “Y-You don’t like that?” 

“It’s fine,” she says, absently. “I come.” 

He pauses to catch his breath again. “You don’t think it’s fine.” 

“I miss before…” she trails off. It is the closest he has heard her come to acknowledging the cheating. 

“Yeah,” he says. 

“Because it’s like, sometimes I’m too caught up with trying to make it, I don’t know, unforgettable? That I forget to enjoy it, or something,” she goes on. “Think he does the same thing too. 

He frowns at the confession’s heaviness. It isn’t the Perrie he is used to, the levity that was there a few minutes ago, replaced by despondent introspection. 

“So that thing he told me about where he comes on your toes, you don’t like it?” Louis says, brightening the mood with absurdities.

“Goodness me, no. I’d rather he came on my boobs.” 

Louis thinks he might actually die from the rush of blood to his cock. It can’t be just like his fucking dream months ago that started this whole miserable thing. She can’t possibly be saying this. 

“Like I know they’re small and everything but they still want to be touched,” she says.

“Right.” 

“It doesn’t take much. They’re so sensitive. Like if I play with them a little with my fingers I’m nearly there...” She chokes out an “oh my God” as if she finally realizes what she has been saying. 

Louis hums his acknowledgment, too far beyond words. 

She laughs. “Ignore the last thing, yeah? But I think all the lads do that. They think if they’re too little they can skip it, I swear.“ 

“I wouldn’t,” Louis says. “I mean, lots of us, wouldn’t. I wouldn’t.” 

“Is that right?” 

“Yeah. You’d…a girl has to show me how though, first. So…I know.” If he could take a pill to snuff out the TITF syndrome, to stop talking, he would. 

“I could do that,” she says, faster than he expects her to. She doesn’t correct her pronoun. 

Louis tries to engage his free hand in other activities. He taps the bench to a stupid beat that he keeps losing halfway through or grips the side of the bench to give his hand something else, that isn’t his dick, to grasp. “Uh, but he pays attention to everything else…?” 

“Yeah, I’d say. But sometimes I want him to be a little rougher.” 

 _Please stop_ , Louis thinks, as his hand goes to his cock. _Please stop this._  

“Rougher?” he says, inviting her to say more, despite the state of himself. 

“Sometimes he fucks me like I can break easily. It’s funny. Do you do that to her?” 

“El?” he asks, saying her name like he has heard it before but can’t place it as he rubs at himself. “I do whatever you—she wants. As long as it feels good.” 

He tries not to focus on his shifting pronouns, focuses on instead on getting the front of his pants low enough to get his hard cock over the band. When his dick is out, he strokes himself, slow and steady. “I would just want you to feel good. El to feel good. I want you-her, her, to feel good.” 

Perrie’s breath grows faster against the phone. “I think no matter what you did, it would feel good.” 

“I could,” he says, “I could if you gave me the chance.” His hand picks up speed. “Let me.” 

“Let you what?” she asks.

“Let me touch you.” 

“We can’t. Don’t make me tie your hands behind your back next time I see you,” she threatens. 

“Then I’d put my tongue on you. I don’t even need my hands. You can cut them off. Fuck, I just want to fucking taste you.” 

“Shit, Louis,” she gasps. “This is wrong, Louis.” 

“We’re too late for that, love. Just tell me you’re touching yourself too.” 

“Uh huh.” 

“Good,” he says, shivering.    

“I’m not long yet,” she says, “thinking of you under me with your hands up at my boobs, while I’m riding you.” 

The image of it is in his head, crystal clear too, and making him jerk his shaft faster. “Touch your tits, love. Memorize that thing you do with your fingers so you can show me.” 

She moans his name at that, like she wants him to stop and continue at the same time. It makes Louis’ hand pump himself faster. 

He hears something in the background, a soft, wet, sucking sound. 

“‘Sat you fingering yourself?” 

“Y-Yeah. Why?” 

It picks up speed. 

“I can hear it.” 

“No you’re not supposed to,” she laughs, spasmodically. “I thought I was being quiet.” 

“I’m not supposed be thinking about how wet you are right now but here we are. And you’re never quiet, babe. I hear you with Zayn all the time.” 

“You do?” 

“All the time. And I want it to be me, who’s making you sound like that,” he pants, nearly at the edge. 

Perrie whines. “Can you still hear that?”

The sound has slowed considerably. Louis thinks she must be fucking her fingers deeply and slowly. 

“Yeah, just a bit, love, and I wish I couldn’t,” he grits. He tucks himself back into his underwear and trackies as quickly as he can before come spurts against the fabric, wetting his cock. He bends his chest toward his knees as it keeps hitting him, and all he can manage is breathing through it. 

“Have you…?”

“Yeah,” he mumbles, embarrassed at his poor showing.

Perrie goes another minute of fingering herself and then she whimpers, plaintively, as her breath catches for a moment before heaving into her phone. 

Louis puts a hand to his head and looks at the wall clock. Nearly thirty minutes have gone by, now. He can only wonder what he will have to tell Eleanor. 

“I should go,” he says. 

“Yeah. Me too.” She says something else but her voice is so tightly wound, Louis can’t make out the words. 

“Don’t be scared, babe. Nothing terrible’s happened, yeah?”

He thinks to himself he is right, even if they’re both damp with their own come. Neither one of them has touched the other to get them this way. It is hardly cheating, even if he has to convince himself of it. 

“Yeah,” she says, voice stronger than before. 

“Good night, love,” he says.

“Night. Thanks for the…chat?” she snorts. 

“Yeah. Great chat.”

His fingers shake as he hits the end call button and his heart plummets to his stomach when his phone shows that half an hour has elapsed as he talked to Perrie before the screen goes black. He drifts back upstairs to his room, wind still knocked out of him, bracing the hallway walls for support. 

Eleanor opens the door just as he puts his hand up to knock on it, his rush to find somewhere private sending him dashing out the door without his keycard. Eleanor tugs along her bag and a sour expression.  

“Oh, you’re finished now?” she asks. “Were you going to let me starve to death while you were on the phone?” 

“I’m sorry,” he says. 

“Who was that?” 

“Where are you going?” Louis asks. 

 “Home,” she says, and sucks in her cheeks so her lips pucker. She watches his face for a reaction.

“Now?” Louis frowns. He looks at his phone, at how late it is. “No, you’re not.” 

“Yes. I am. A car is downstairs, waiting for me.”

“What?” 

“Don’t worry you’re paying for it, apparently,” she says. “Let me know when you’re ready to tell me who you were talking to.” 

She looks down briefly, shakes her head and glares at him. She walks past, when he says nothing, pulling her suitcase behind her. The breeze of her passing brings the artificially cool air that the hotel has been pumping. He puts a foot out to catch the door, and watches her disappear into the elevator door, this, the fruits of his reticence.  

Louis glances down at his sweatpants when he is back in his room. The fabric has gone dark gray in small, nebulous shapes from his come.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If anyone is still reading this, I am sorry for the wait. Due to my hectic life, my plans for a very lengthy chapter 6 and the fact that I still feel compelled to complete a big bang project, the conclusion of this fic might be a while. 
> 
> I do mean a while.
> 
> Just a warning. 
> 
> Thank you for reading xo!

**_V._ **

The earring flashes white, green and pink as Louis twists it in the light that shines from the hotel’s large, gaudy signage outside of his window. He had thought he would be Zayn tonight, leaving the blinds open, though it was done purposely, letting the faint neon light be his only illumination in this dark room. The small jewel in the earring catches the light and throws back kaleidoscope shadows over his fingers where he grasps it and onto the bed. Eleanor had left it in her haste to get away from him, and he cradles it in his fingers, considering all of this strife he has caused. 

He checks his phone again, though he had looked at it only a second before. His phone remains devoid of any text or call notifications, the background picture of Eleanor kissing him, mocking his anxiety. He has had the volume on his ringer turned up to nuclear levels in case he actually manages to fall asleep but he hasn’t been able to for the last three hours, staring at the walls instead. The hours of the night escape from him. 

Louis called her eight times, left double the amount of text messages to no response. He thought of her on her flight, somewhere over the Atlantic. Would she be crying? Plotting an inevitably long verbal castigation that would leave him sweating and begging her to reconsider? Or worse, was she adding up all of the little lies, all of Louis’ inadvertently dropped hints, and realizing what he was doing? 

He jokes, darkly, with himself that if worst comes to worst, he could follow in Zayn’s footsteps and get a tattoo of her visage somewhere on his body. He doesn’t know if it would prove his love or his desperation. 

Louis sets the earring on the table, and turns over in his bed, naked, because his damp track pants are too ruined to sleep in, comfortably. He hits the home key one more time on his phone, and gets excited because he hears a sound. No change registers on his phone and his stomach plummets another step when he realizes it is knock, not his phone’s ringer notifying him that Eleanor doesn’t want to end things. 

The knocking starts again, a rap-rap-rap loud enough for Louis to hear in his room but muffled enough to echo from a different door. Rap-rap-rap. 

Louis rolls toward the edge of the bed, foot grazing the ground. The knocking has ceased and the buzzing silence that Louis had done so well at tuning out resumes. He pulls his leg back into bed as the knocking starts again. 

“What the fuck,” he grumbles and gets out of bed in earnest. 

At the peephole, he sees Harry knocking at Zayn’s door, the rap-rap-rap, more urgently this time.

“Harry?” Louis calls when he opens the door. He angles his chest around the door, but shields his lower half with the door. 

Harry spins around looking for the owner of the voice. He waves when he sees Louis.

“What are you doing?” 

“Nothing,” Harry says, face losing some its affable pretense. 

“No, really, what are you doing? At Zayn’s door at…” Louis turns to check his phone. “Two in the morning?” 

“We were playing a game,” Harry says, mournfully. 

“What kind of game?” 

Harry smiles and shakes his head. “A game. It’s over now, I think.” 

Louis rolls his eyes. “Does this ‘game’ have something to do with the pictures of that prostitute and Zayn? Or was it you and Zayn?” 

He expects Harry to be stricken, for him take a knee-knocking step back, his head snapping backward to avoid the truth has been hurtled at him. But like many things Louis has expected this night, it doesn’t quite play out. Harry winks at him. 

“It’s not what you think,” he says. 

“What is it, then?” Louis says. 

“Are you wearing anything behind that door?” 

“No,” Louis spits. “You want to suck me off next? My blinds are open too.” 

“Maybe later tonight, thanks.” 

“So what is it? Really?” 

“Have him tell you about it sometime. It was a funny game.” 

He lopes down the hallway toward Louis, the sides of flannel shirt that is open down to his navel, fluttering in on his neck and chest. He winks again as he goes past him to the bank of elevators. Louis opens his mouth to inquire as to what late night activity he is off to do but closes it. No matter what Harry says it will be riddles and cheeky gestures that are barely comprehensible at this point. 

Louis lets go of the door and compulsively checks his phone again. Still nothing and nothing again when he checks it after he sinks back onto the bed and arranges the blankets back over himself. 

As the night sky outside changes from black, to royal blue, to sky-blue striped with purple-pink clouds, Louis wills himself to poke holes in the layer of his misdeeds that cocoons him, conjuring up what he can remember of the pictures Alex showed them all. But every time he gets a sizeable rip started, Harry’s words stitch over the tear. 

He falls sleep when the sun is nearly overhead, wondering if there were any victors in this awful game.   

 

 

Louis tells Eleanor it was Perrie, when she finally calls him, a full twenty-four hours and thirty-eight text messages since she had left. He regales her with a half-accurate story about Perrie’s mixed feelings about Zayn’s tattoo, blaming her distress and his honorable inability to hang up until it her fears had been assuaged. It is true enough; he won’t make his lies more complicated than necessary. 

“Why didn’t you just tell me that when I asked?” she says. 

“I wasn’t sure if it was private or not. She was upset.” 

“Did you think I would go running to Zayn? I can keep a secret.” 

Louis hadn’t gulped down his, “Not nearly as well as me, love,” fast enough, but Eleanor laughs a tinkling laugh that has no identifiable shreds of suspicion, light and airy. He apologizes for withholding it from her again and she apologizes for leaving again. 

“It’s hard for me when you’re away so much, you know,” she says. “I went a bit mad thinking it was someone you’ve been shagging on the road.” 

Her admission changes the course of the conversation to one that is fraught with sighing, long silences and whispered reassurances that feel as hollow as a drum to Louis. 

“Come out and again and stay this time,” he says, when he has exhausted his verbal comfort. 

“Should I?” 

“Yeah. When’s the earliest you can come out?”

One hour and two phone calls later, she is to meet him in New York. He hangs up, beaming at his stupid luck, until he remembers Perrie is coming to New York, too.

 

 

 

Though his spirits rebound, he feels Eleanor’s absence in the next two cities. Coming back to his empty hotel room and its sterile coziness leaves him in a nasty mood that he tries to drink, smoke or jerk out of himself. It rarely works, kicking up his preoccupation with Perrie, her tits, and both sets of her lips, that make him gloomy until he goes back to the tour bus, back to the safety of his bunk, where his proximity to the others stave off memories of the sound of her coming from resounding in his head until he is smothering his own wanked out cries. 

Zayn joins him on the bus one night, complaining the expanse of the room is too spooky. They share beers, enjoying each other’s company, but Zayn nearly kills Louis when he tells him a story that ends with Perrie having had to go about on all fours as she looked for something. 

“Spare me the details of your kinks, mate,” Louis says, as the image of Perrie, naked on all fours took root in his mind. Zayn laughs but Louis chugs to erase how she would look with her back arched and her cunt tilting toward him, until he is the one crawling on all fours back to his bunk. 

“What’s the game?” Louis slurs, emboldened and dizzy, remembering Harry’s words.

“What?” Zayn asks, squinting as he laughs. 

“The game. You. Harry.” 

Louis flops onto his bunk, soft pillows and blanket caressing his limbs, while Zayn collapses onto his bed across the aisle. 

“What?” Zayn repeats. 

Louis flips himself on his side, precariously balancing his head on one arm to face Zayn’s bunk. “Harry said you were playing a game. And the pictures in Mexico. They’re you and him, right?” 

Though his sight is cloudy, he can make out the tension in Zayn’s hair-dusted jaw. 

“Why are you doing that to her?” Louis asks. “She doesn’t deserve it.” 

“You don’t know shit, Lou,” Zayn says. 

“Enlighten me.” 

“I love her.” 

“Okay, but does that really mean anything?” Louis says, eyes falling shut. He wills his eyelids upward, but they drop back down as soon as he stops concentrating.

“Fuck you,” Zayn grunts 

“Yeah that was shitty of me,” Louis says, the blackness behind his closed eyes spinning. “But what does messing about with Harry have to do with how much you love her?” 

“I was doing it because I love her,” Zayn sighs. Zayn’s sheets rustle and the mattress squeaks, heralding the wordless, aural finality of the conversation. 

“Losing me, mate,” Louis says, consciousness sinuously escaping from his mind like steam from a cup of tea. He struggles to elevate his eyelids again but they lay flat against his eyes, heavy and immobile. 

“I’ll die if I lose her,” Zayn says. “I have to be better than I’ve been so I was trying this thing with—“ 

“Fucking Harry…” Louis says, yawning, “stops you from losing her? Strangest way of keeping…keeping her.” 

“We never fucked. We…” 

Louis doesn’t hear the rest, lost to the illusory firing squad.

 

 

 

Getting into the New York hotel requires levels of espionage worthy of any Bond film Louis has seen, the cramped urban planning and traffic squeezing out any relaxed protocols they have followed in other cities. Double the amount of security is required, twice the amount of muscular, serious men to guard them, three times as many intricate routes to avoid the crowds, already in front of the hotels, awaiting them. 

An hour before driving in, the band had dispersed to two separate cars, Niall and Harry in one, Liam, Zayn and Louis in the other, to cruise into the city. The tour buses made their way to the venue independently, too clunky and conspicuous for cramped city streets. 

When Louis sees New York’s skyline, its glittering triangular building-tops against the twilight like beacons in the horizon, his heart thumps a drumbeat of excited dread. Right on cue, he gets a text from Eleanor. 

_Just landed._  

_Cant wait_ he types back. 

He swears to himself that seeing Eleanor again, feeling her under him again, will put a stop to the shitty holding pattern he has been locked in since her departure. 

Zayn’s phone buzzes against Louis’ thigh and he thrusts his hands for it immediately. Louis knows who it is from the dopey smile and the way he curls his shoulders as he reads the text, furtively, like a schoolboy trying to hide his young paramour’s love notes from his mates’ view. 

Zayn stares at the text, looks up and glares back down at the phone again. He thumbs out a text message and replaces his phone, pulling the brim of his hat low over his face. 

Louis strains his eyes to search for an answer in the shadow over his face but there is nothing there that he can make out. Zayn is too studied at keeping things   

 

 

 

As they wait to get the OK to exit the car, watching a slew of managers and hotel employees conversing frenetically, Louis taps his feet in time to the rhythm of his racing heart. _Thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump._ Save for the tapping, the wait is a silent affair, everyone too tired from the early wake up call in Boston to make politely empty conversation. 

Zayn’s shoulders rubbing against Liam and Louis as his hands twist and turn a carton of cigarettes in his hands over and over. He stops periodically, begins to unlatch the top of the carton until he remembers where he is and closes it again. The twisting and turning begins anew. 

“Did Perrie get in yet?” Louis asks him, anything to distract him from this maddening fidgeting. 

Zayn shakes his head and spins the cigarettes around. 

“On her way then?” 

“She said she missed her flight,” Zayn snaps. 

“What?” Liam asks. “Really?” 

Zayn lets his head loll against the headrest, screws up his mouth to one side. 

“How did she manage that?” Louis says, relief guffawing out of him. “She’s not coming?” 

Zayn gives him an aggravated once-over and his eyes are too discerning as they traverse Louis’ face. Louis makes a mental note to stop talking about Perrie if all he can manage to do is give himself away. 

“She just got there late, I guess,” he pouts. “Probably overslept.” 

“Can’t she get on another flight?” Liam asks. Louis blinks away the murderous daggers that his eyes shoot Liam. 

“With the girls’ schedule…she thinks she might have to meet up with me later on tour.” 

Liam pats the top of Zayn’s chest, smiling glumly. Zayn holds Liam’s hand over his heart and lets it go. Louis reaches to pat Zayn’s forearm, to show similar solidarity, but thinks he will be able to tell how weak it is. Louis can’t think of anything to say, so he looks down at the ground stupidly, watching his nervously tapping feet. 

A manager taps the window signaling that they can finally get out. Zayn’s heavy steps in his boots make a depressing, trotting beat as they move through the garage and to the hotel lobby. Louis goes ahead of him, starts to imitate his walk with enough affectation that Zayn playfully shoves him, in spite of his stone-faced sadness. 

He is cheered enough to laugh at Louis’ head bopping, pseudo pop and lock dance that he does to the little beeps and dings of the elevator as it makes its way up to the boys’ floors. By the 21st floor, Zayn is doing his own silly movements in time to the dings. Even within the same hotel they get separated, to keep away ambitious fans from. When they reach the 26th floor, Zayn and Louis give each other a little nod and are off to their respective rooms at opposite ends of the hall. 

“See you later,” Liam says to them, remaining in the elevator for one more floor. He will be occupying a room on the floor above theirs. 

Louis enters his room, ready to jump in the shower and craft profuse apologies to repeat to Eleanor when she arrives. Then he intends to follow them up with as many verbal and physical declarations of love that it takes to get the fear out of her voice whenever she brought up his touring schedule. 

But he is stopped dead by the form on the bed. 

Perrie is curled on her side, back turned away from the door. Her body makes a tiny semicolon with her topknot punctuating her body’s comma in those baggy, light gray trackies. As he creeps closer he realizes she’s asleep, faint sighs escaping as she exhales. Her bags are at her feet, haphazardly thrown in the vicinity of the bed, as though she’d come in and collapsed. 

He ball changes backwards to check his room number again. _2606_. Exactly the same room number he had been assigned yet here she is, still asleep even after the door slams. 

Louis goes through a series of questions in his head, each rattling his skull in search of answers he can’t find: Why is she here? Didn’t she miss her flight? Where is Eleanor? Did Eleanor come and see her like this and leave? Did Perrie lie to Zayn to visit him? Had she gone mental? Is someone playing a shitty joke on him, with the one person he doesn’t need to see like this, spread out on his bed like a pagan gift? A choral _This isn’t happening_ chants underneath all of the questions, increasing in volume with each second in her presence. 

The answer eventually floats down to him, amidst all his cerebral hysteria, and he walks to the bed. 

Mix-up. 

“Love,” he says, as he stands over her, shaking her arm. “Wrong room.” 

She stirs and turns over, her eyes fluttering open. She sees him and smiles but then her eyes are falling closed again. Her lips still bear the smile as she readjusts, falling back asleep, and Louis feels himself mirroring her soft smile that she probably reserves for Zayn in the mornings. 

“Where’s Zayn?” she asks as she stretches, and Louis back straightens at the reminder of her boyfriend. His mate. Still, he tries not to let on how it hurts him. 

“In his room being a moody mess because of you,” he says. “Didn’t you miss your flight?” 

She laughs and puts a hand on her face. “I lied. I was going to surprise him.” 

“Oh.” 

“I didn’t think he would believe it. I waited until I got here to tell him that. He didn’t think it was weird timing?” 

Shit sits up and her arms go the opposite way for another stretch, her shirt revealing a cross section of her waist that draws Louis eyes. 

Louis shook his head. “No. He was just upset.” 

“Poor thing,” she says. Her pink lips curl downward as she blinks slowly, in a maddeningly adorable way. 

“You were going to surprise him by being asleep in his room?” Louis asks 

“No. I was going to hide in the closet when I heard him about to come in and then pop out,” she says, putting her hands out to show him. “But oh god, I got in and saw this comfy bed and couldn’t resist it.” 

She flops backward on it, half-lidded eyes as her back makes contact with the mattress again. Louis stares at her spread out, her arms bracketing her head and legs slightly parted. He turns to the floor before his mind can betray him with all the things that could happen if he kneeled on the ground in front of her and slowly dragged down her pants. 

“Well, you should be leaving soon, yeah?” he asks.   

“Yeah.” Her limbs stayed glued in place to where they lie. 

He moves closer and tests the edge of the mattress with his hand. It gives in without hesitation, his hand sinking deeply as the comforter floods the sides of hand, with little pressure. He sits down cautiously and lies back on the bed. She wasn’t joking. It is extremely comfortable. The bed swallows his body, like he’s landed in a pile of freshly fallen snow. He can see why she can’t get up; the bed perfectly cradles his body and moving his limbs seems horribly enervating.

“You know, you’re lucky you ended up here and not with some old freak who’s just found young trim in his bed,” he says to the ceiling. 

Perrie turns her head to his, strands of her glinting, silver hair coming loose. “How do you know I wouldn’t charm my way out of it? Maybe he’d just be lonely after his wife died or something and we could play chess and I’d have a new friend.” 

“Right, and maybe he’d just want to see you naked.” 

Perrie’s chin lifts to the side. “Would he?” 

Louis drags his gaze from the ceiling to lock eyes with Perrie’s. His breathing gets ragged as her face seems to get a fraction closer to his and he wonders if this is how the road to hell starts, with what ifs and cozy hotel beds. 

“He would,” he whispers. 

She closes the distances between them, her lips fluttering over his. He responds immediately, hungrily, pushing his lips against hers, reveling in the divine feel of her soft lips under his. He tugs her bottom lip into his mouth, softly nipping it as his hands land on her hip and rove upward. 

She puts her hand on his face as she opens her mouth, extending her tongue into his mouth. Louis slides his tongue against hers, and hikes up the side of her sweatshirt when his hand reaches the valley of her turned waist. It rises easily on one side and he feels the underside of her breast on the side of his thumb. 

Perrie’s hand begins it’s own opposite travel, moving from his face to shoulder, down the length of his arm, tripping over to his waist and curving inward to cup him through his shorts. He’s half soft but her slow caresses make him hard with little effort. 

Louis works the top of her sweatshirt as far as it will go and breaks the kiss when he feels the entirety of her breast mold against his palm. Perrie shivers and her nipple hardens into his skin.   

“Fuck, love,” he groans. “Fuck.” 

His arms propel him from the bed, leaping away and backing toward the door.    

“Fuck,” he says again. “What are you doing here? Why can’t you stay away from me?” 

Perrie sits up, face distorted at his reaction. “What? Me? You’re the one who just kissed me.” 

Louis loses his words to her still-bare left breast until she realizes and pulls down the side of her sweatshirt. Her hands go to her hair, scraping at the loose strands to tie them back away from her face. They immediately fall back down and she removes her hair tie, letting her hair fall to her shoulders, creased in places where it had been held up. 

“You want this too,” he says. “Don’t put this all on me.” 

Perrie’s halts her efforts to gather her hair up again. 

“Tell me you don’t,” Louis says, approaching the bed.  “Tell me it’s in my head. Please. So I can move on and stop being a cunt to my best friend and a shit boyfriend.” 

Her hands move again, laying her hair against her scalp in circular arrangement, and pulling the hair tie over and through. “Do you want me to lie to you, too? Was my hand down the front of your pants not enough or do you need me to get a finger up your bum too?” 

Her tone is airy and her lips are parted enough that her teeth are visible, but she’s not wearing something Louis would call a smile. Her eyes are too dull and she scratches at the sides of her hair too forcefully. 

“You need to go,” Louis tells her. “El’s going to be here soon and Zayn’s probably crying in the shower. You should go collect him.” 

“You think so?” she says. 

“Blubbering like that? Without a doubt,” Louis says. He puts fisted hands to the corners of his eyes, as he screws up his face and chokes out an anguished, “Perrie…”   

She laughs sadly at the impression and pouts. It reminds him of Zayn’s sulking in the car, bond so strong they’ve begun favoring each other’s expressions. 

“Poor thing.”   

Louis cradles her chin between this thumb and forefinger. “He’s mad about you, love. So let’s not fuck that up.”   

“You sound so mature. Who would have thought?” she says. 

“I’m capable. Sometimes.” 

Perrie gazes up at him with horridly compassionate eyes that make his insides flip. 

“Yeah. We should stop this.” 

Perrie’s affirmation steels this decision though it begins to feel suffocating. He squeezes her chin, fondly, before he lets her go. 

She stands up and lifts the handle of her suitcase. He follows her to the door, righting the suitcase’s wheels when they roll into the leg of the dressing bench, edged near the closet. Every step towards the door sounds like a heavy goodbye.    

His phone dings. Eleanor. 

_Just got in the car. Be there in a bit xx_. 

He types a smiley face back. 

“Oh God, is that her? Is she here?” Perrie asks, her hand on the door. “I don’t want you to get in trouble over nothing.” 

“No. She’s getting here,” he says. “But we’d say it was a room mix up anyway. It’s not a lie.” 

“Good,” she says. She starts at the door and hesitates again. “This won’t be weird, right?” 

“What? You and me? Never.” 

“Good. Because sometimes it, like, it gets weird or something after you’ve thought of someone naked, even if nothing happens—“   

“Thought of me naked, Perrie?” His fringe cuts into his vision, slivers of her face cut out by his hair. 

“—and sometimes boys get stupid and can’t be your friend anymore because they’ve thought of the same thing—“ she goes on. 

“Answer the question.” 

One of her eyes crosses toward the bridge of her nose as she curls her upper lip and shakes her head. “For God’s sake, obviously I have, Louis.” 

“When?” he asks. 

“Does it really matter?” 

“Yes.” It does he thinks because all of the kisses, all of the caresses, all of the sneaking around, mean nothing next to this confession that it hasn’t only been his misguided chasing and self-generated assurances that maybe she might want this as badly as he does. 

“On the phone that last time.” She lets the handle of her suitcase go. “But before then.” 

“When before then?” He feels the rising again, stirring at the top of his stomach, lashing against the muscles that keep it tucked back. 

“Before Zayn. They asked me on camera which one of you was my favorite when the girls and I were in the house. You were my favorite, first. And I thought of you that night. But I couldn’t do anything about it because, you know, everyone else was around.” 

She laughs nervously. 

He hadn’t always the second place prize, he thinks. The fact that once upon a time, it was Louis who was making her wonder not Zayn, see, to trigger a combination of chemicals in his brain that awakens his TITF syndrome, because the rising comes up out of his stomach and splashes into his mouth. 

“Fuck me. Why did you have to go and say that, love?” Louis asks, striding toward her. 

She isn’t ready for him when he collides with her. She takes a step back and is met by the door and they bounce when they hit it. He puts his mouth to hers, licking her bottom lip before he puts his own lips there, pushing back on hers. Their lips graze and retreat rhythmically, Louis moving his head sideways, freeing their noses from crushing against each other’s cheeks.    

Perrie’s hands grasp Louis’ shirt in both hands as he cups her chin, their tongues sliding together, back and forth. He moves from her mouth to the side of her neck, kissing downwards and moving his hands south. They stop when they find her breasts, hidden beneath the bulky sweatshirt. He rubs his hands up and then down over them but impatiently pulls up her shirt when the fabric proves too thick to feel her properly.

He tears away from her neck when he gets the hem up under her chin so he can finally see them again, identical to the memory he had stored of them months ago. They swell into his hand perfectly and Perrie moans tenderly when his thumbs graze her nipples, so they pucker. He dips his head, kisses the down the top of her breasts and when his bottom lip hits the hard swollen of her nipples he puts his tongue out and flicks over it. 

Perrie breath skitters as his lips circle one pink tip, sucking it in. He teethes it lightly, slowly, then moves to her other breast to repeat the pattern. Perrie’s arm moves centrally bumping his chest slightly. When he pulls away from her breast, he sees that she is rubbing herself through her trackies, her hand moving forward and backward. 

Louis replaces her hand with his, and deepens the pressure, so that her mouth falls open. He moves his hand up until his fingers tickle the band of the pants, emboldened by her reaction. He down sinks them behind the band, bends his wrist to get his fingers over her clit. Her wetness dampens his fingers immediately, slicking the way for him to rub her in quick, jittering movements. 

Perrie wails and Louis yanks his hand away, putting one finger up to her lips to silence her. She smiles around his finger as she sucks her wetness away from it. His cock twitches at the sight. 

“If…if we do this, you have to be quiet,” he whispers, replacing his hand down her pants shakily. 

She nods seriously. 

“You probably won’t get me to yell like that,” she whispers, her mouth wrestling with a grin. 

In retaliation, Louis slides two fingers in her deeply, wringing a moan out of her that he just barely captures with his own mouth. 

“I’ll be quiet,” she says when he pulls away. 

“We can’t on the bed,” he says. “It’ll look fucked up and we can’t waste time tidying the sheets.” 

Perrie nods again. “Where?” 

Louis looks over his shoulders around the room. He considers the bathroom, but all he can think of is a shower fuck and it would be too obvious with damp hair and drenched clothes. 

The desk arises as an option but it is covered with menus and city tourism guides that promise hidden treasures in the Big Apple and a large, useless desk calendar. He briefly imagines fucking Perrie while the books all fell to the floor and the calamitous noises it would all make. 

But set apart from it is a large loveseat, angled in toward the bed a corner of the room. It is sturdy, solid and soft enough, if she’s willing. 

“Chair,” he says. 

He takes her hand and guides her to the chair, rubbing himself through his trousers, the anticipation of it making him painfully hard. He sits down in it, and pulls her forward over him so she is forced to bend her knees and bookend his legs with hers. 

“D’you think you can manage this?” he asks her, sliding his hand between their pelvises to rub at her here again, his hand providing friction for both of them. 

“Yeah,” she says. She bends to kiss him as she flicks her hips against his hand. 

“We have to hurry,” he says, harshly. 

Perrie stands up and pulls her trackies down to her ankles without any hesitation, her pale feet stepping out of the holes. Louis follows her lead, and shimmies out of his jeans, until they’re halfway down his thighs. His cock pushes against his pants, folded toward him at a horrid angle. He pushes it down to meet his jeans, freeing it to bob free. He strokes himself and she watches him, her eyes drawn to his quick-fire hand movements. She goes for the blue sides of her pants but Louis stops her. 

“Leave it on,” he says, as he grabs her hand and pulls her over. “You can get dressed faster if you do.” 

Perrie straddles him as Louis pulls her shirt up again, and caresses her breasts. She rocks herself along his length that makes him moan at the friction. 

“I’m going to lose it if you keep doing that,” he says, ducking to taste her tits again. 

“Good,” she says, biting her lip. She snaps her hips against his cock again, slowly, and Louis buries his head in the crook her neck, clenching her hips to still her. 

“Stop, stop, stop,” he says. 

She pauses.   

He uses one hand to snatch her pants aside, and get a finger inside of her. Her warmth and wetness make his breathing go ragged. He adds another finger, thrusting inside of her and Perrie’s hips meet his fingers’ pace. Her cheek presses against his temple, her hot breath puffing against his ear as she rides his fingers. 

He pulls out of her, sneaking a taste to which she gives him a gratified smile and grabs his cock as Perrie leans up enough for him to have room to position himself. 

He guides himself into her but the combination of his shaking hands and her slickness has him slipping just short of his goal, feeling like a virgin all over again, fumbling for the right angle.   

“You need to put me in, babe,” he says, giving up the last time his cock slides against her clit. 

“Okay. Wait,” she says. “What about a condom?” 

“Fuck,” Louis says, hitting his head against her collarbone, repeatedly. “I never use them with El. She takes care of that stuff.“ 

Perrie’s expression is unreadable. “You don’t just have any lying around for groupies?” 

“I don’t fuck them…anymore.” 

“I don’t believe you,” she says. 

“The groupies or the condoms, love?” he asks, putting hands on either side of her head, threading them through her hair that keeps falling loose. “Because I didn’t expect to be fucking you now, no matter how badly I’ve wanted to.” 

He listens to her tremulous breathing for a beat. Then she reaches down between them and grasps him at the base of his shaft, stroking him for a beat until he begs, breathlessly, “In. Please. Please.” 

She puts him at her opening and lowers herself on him, slowly until he’s all the way inside and panting against her shoulder. Without encouragement Perrie starts to move over him, as he tugs up her shirt. He gets a nipple into his mouth, sucking and licking in between pauses to fuck up at her from underneath, clutching her waist and slamming into her with little finesse. He would be embarrassed if her head wasn’t going back, baring her neck as she follows his pace. 

Louis senses his oncoming orgasm in the distance. 

“What’s the thing you do? With your tits? To come?” he asks her as he thrusts upward, slowing the pace as much as he can. 

“What?” Perrie asks, bleary blue eyes struggling to focus. 

“You said…you said you can come from touching them,” he wheezes, squeezing her breasts to reinforce the subject. He needs her to hurry at this rate. 

As she rides him she tweaks her nipples in half circles that entrance Louis. Her mouth opens with unsaid cries that he would kill someone to hear. 

His right thigh tingles and he wonders if it has fallen asleep, the muscles prickling in their descent into slumber, until he realizes it is his phone. 

Eleanor. 

Here. 

“Shit, shit,” he says into her chest, Perrie senses his alarm and picks up speed, her hands clawing into his neck as she uses him for leverage. He meets her speed as his rhythm falls apart. He needs to pull out now but he selfishly pumps into her longer than he should. 

“I’m coming, I’m coming, I’m coming,” he hisses. 

Perrie lifts off him but he has already started inside of her. It gets over the bottom of her thighs and the top of his, on the edges of his shirt. She springs to her feet, come dribbling down one thigh, and rushes off to the bathroom. She returns with a handful of tissues to help clean them up, as Louis hears the elevator’s arriving chirp in the distance. 

“Dressed. Get dressed,” he says, struggling against his own languid limbs that impede his sense of urgency. 

“I’m hurrying,” she insists, stretching her trackies back over her legs. She walks the used tissues to the bathroom and flushes them away. 

Louis is successful enough in getting his pants and jeans up and buttoned and checks his phone. 

_I’m downstairs. See you in a sec x._

He cringes when he thinks about the elevator and trips to the peephole. Eleanor is in the hallway, but she turns to the opposite side of the hall, toward Zayn’s room. 

“They must have given her the wrong room too,” he whispers. 

Perrie stands at the mirror, fixing her hair and straightening her clothes. She turns to him. “What should we do?” 

It is the most scared he has seen her since this ordeal has started, eyes large as grapefruits, one hand going to hold her opposite elbow, fingers between her teeth. 

“W-we won’t get caught,” he tells her, though the stutter ruins the guarantee. 

“But how do we explain why I’m still here?” 

“Go back to sleep. Just like how you were when I got here.” 

“Just do it. Quick,” he says, when her face betrays her confusion. 

Perrie flies back onto the bed, curling up just as she did when he first entered. Louis goes to his overnight back, opens it up and rustles with the items. He throws his scant tops and bottoms onto the dresser. 

No sooner has he emptied his bag than a knock sounds on the door. “Louis?” Zayn calls. 

Louis goes to his clothes and tears his stained shirt off his head. He puts a clean one on, and hustles toward the door, dirty shirt balled in his hand. 

“Louis?” Zayn calls again, knocking louder. “Think there’s been a mistake with the room assignments, mate.” 

Louis takes a minute longer to answer the door where Eleanor and Zayn stand at opposite sides of the doorframe. Identically bemused expressions are molded on their faces. He puts his finger to his puckered lips, before either has a chance to speak. Seeing Eleanor now, without a trace of that cold disdain from the last time he saw her feels like he has won the lottery. She barely looks like she’s spent any amount of time on a plane, fresh-faced and glowing. He hopes he doesn’t look obviously fucked. 

“Missing someone?” Eleanor asks. “They gave me Zayn’s room by accident.” 

Louis does a double take dramatically. “Wait, if you’re Eleanor, who the fuck is that?” he whispers, thumbing toward the bed in horror. 

They look over his shoulder at Perrie on the bed. 

“Wait? How?” Zayn asks.

“Guess she caught a new plane out or she’s tops at teleporting, yeah? I figured they fucked up the room assignments. But she looked knackered so I let her sleep.” 

“Babe,” Zayn says tenderly, looking beyond Louis to the bed.

Zayn moves to her as Eleanor sets her bag down and wraps Louis in her arms for a kiss. She tastes minty and smells that flowery like she’d brushed her teeth and freshened up in preparation to see him. Louis feels all the more shitty that he spent that same time learning the curves of Perrie’s breasts with his tongue, willing himself to not find her so bloody adorable as she fought through sleep. 

“They told me _2616_ at the desk,” Eleanor says after they break away. 

He goes straight for her lips again, because doesn’t care, because he needs her to kiss Perrie out of him. She’s chastely giving into his mouth’s pleas, lips finally coming open for a bit of tongue but her hands are firmly in innocent places while Louis’ follow the curve of her ass and the sides of her stomach.  

“I thought so,” he says when he comes up for air. 

He looks for any hint that she can tell what he has been up to before she came but there’s nothing there. Eleanor’s brown eyes look charged from his kiss instead, and Louis glances back at Perrie and Zayn to get them out of the room so he can get this out of his system. 

He wishes he hadn’t looked. 

Zayn is on top of Perrie, his weight pushing her deeper into the comforter, legs and arms tangled, going at it like this is, in fact, their room. 

“Oh yeah,” Louis fake moans. “Right there, baby.” 

He elbows Eleanor and winks at her. She doesn’t miss a beat. 

“Oh yeah. Right there. It feels so good,” she says, in a whining voice that doesn’t sound terribly unlike the women in the porn he’s played as they fucked. If he wasn’t utterly spent from the encounter minutes ago, Eleanor’s performance would have kicked Zayn and Perrie out as quickly as possible, fuck taking the piss. 

“Put your fist in my bum babe, the whole thing,” Louis says, doing his best impression of Zayn. He remembers Perrie’s threat to put her finger in him to show how much she wanted him and he nearly snaps his neck to look at Eleanor, like she can read his guilty thoughts. 

Louis shakes his head at his paranoia when Eleanor tries in vain to stifle a giggle at Perrie and Zayn’s continued embrace. It’s enough to break them up, Zayn’s head detaching from Perrie’s to scowl at Louis. 

“Hey, hey, you’re the ones practically shagging on my bed but you’re annoyed at me?” 

They roll themselves up away from Louis’ bed, feet hitting the carpet. Zayn helps Perrie to her feet and Louis feels a disloyal wave of regret as she leaves his bed. Zayn helps with her bags and they move toward the door, telling Eleanor and Louis lazy goodbyes as they hold hands and murmur to one another. 

“I thought you missed your flight—“ 

“I wanted to surprise you,” she says, patting Zayn’s forearm as they go by. “I was going to hide out in the bathroom and—“ 

The closing door cuts off the rest of their conversation.

When the door shuts behind them, he feels a suffocating sense of finality now that he is alone with Eleanor, now. 

“Why was she on your bed?” she asks, when he has spent too long staring at her polished toes in her sandals, struggling to say something. 

“She was napping,” he says, looking up. “She thought she had the right room so she was having a bit of a rest.” 

“Yeah but she was here the whole time? You didn’t wake her up and let her get back to Zayn?” 

Louis shrugs. “I didn’t want to bother her.” 

“But it’s your room. And someone else’s girlfriend.” 

“Nothing happened. She slept. I unpacked. End of.” 

Nothing in Eleanor’s face tells her what she thinks of his explanation, not her mouth, not her nose, not her eyes. So Louis hopes it has fallen the way he hopes it has—as a simple relaying of the truth, instead of as the way it might have happened if Louis had an ounce of decency in him. 

He moves toward her, fingers the top of her pants. “You seem uncomfortable in these.” 

“I am,” she says, huskily, and Louis knows the explanation is enough, for now. It doesn’t stop him from kissing her like he’s trying to put it, everything, out of their minds. 

As they kiss, Louis laments that he never made Perrie come. He puts his hands under Eleanor’s top, to quell his embarrassment.

 

 

 

Eleanor holds his hand backstage. He doesn’t remember when she started this tradition, if it was a holdover from the earlier shows, or if she had started doing it as the venues got larger, like it would be some comfort to him. It isn’t particularly, but he’s never been scared of the stage, not even in the beginning. The reassurances implied in it are sweet, if unnecessary. 

Outdoor shows have always necessitated more chaotic preparations, particularly when the weather is threatening to erupt in forked lightening and sonorous thunder. Though everyone else is running around, it’s tranquil amorous bliss between Eleanor and Louis. She strokes her fingers along the back of his hand and rests her head on his shoulder, as they sit waiting for the final call to stage. Louis takes the opportunity to gaze at the commotion: Niall looks for his in-ears that he dropped a moment ago under the feet of a cluster of managers and sound engineers; Harry struggles to squeeze his skin into a pair of jeans after vetoing three other pairs he has put on; Liam adjusts his snapback as he gets instructions from a manager. 

Across the way, Perrie and Zayn are sitting next to the stage door, paralleling the way he sits with Eleanor. While his is reverential, theirs is animated. Perrie chatters on about something while Zayn wrinkles his eyebrows and folds his lips together, in a piss poor attempt to hide how hard he wants to laugh whatever she’s saying. 

“Looks like it might rain, but keep at it. We’ll let you know if you’ll need to come back in,” a stage manager declares. “Let’s go lads.” 

“Have fun,” Eleanor says, then leans for a kiss. 

“Thanks babe,” he says against her mouth and steals one last kiss. 

As Louis turns toward the stage door, he catches Zayn and Perrie having a similar moment, though from what he can tell, their tongues are excavating portions of each other’s mouths. It goes on forever.

“Not sure now’s the time for a quickie,” Louis says, bitterly.

“That’s where you’re wrong,” Harry tells him. “It’s always a good time for a quickie.” 

Louis smacks him playfully on the shoulder and Harry touches it with a bleak look like it was truly painful. Zayn and Perrie break away and stand up from the bench so Zayn can queue up with the rest of the band. She gives him a hug, and he takes the opportunity to kiss her forehead, before they let go. 

“Anyone else want a pre-show hug? Me and the girls give each other hugs before we get on-stage. One of the rituals!” Perrie announces with her arms outstretched. 

“Yeah, I’ll take one,” Niall says, sliding into her arms and lifting her off her feet. 

“Other takers?” she asks, waving her arms. “Liam? Harry?” 

“Definitely,” Harry says. He beckons Liam over with his head. “You take the back, I go front?” 

“Yeah,” Liam tells him. 

Then the two of them are sandwiching Perrie in a hug so tight she starts to squeak for help. It only makes Liam and Harry cling to each other’s shoulders harder, asking aloud if anyone hears anything. 

“Hey! Hey!” Zayn says, pretending to scold them. “Let her breathe!” 

Louis smiles at the charade and how Perrie takes big, gulping breaths when they’ve let her go. 

And then there was one. 

“Come here,” Perrie calls to him softly.  

“Fine, love.” He says like it is a death sentence. 

She wraps her arms around him when he approaches, and he returns the gesture in kind, slipping his arms around her small waist, tightly holding her against him. In his head the whole thing goes on for hours but she loosens her embrace a moment after she initiates it so Louis lets her go. But as she pulls away she turns her face toward his cheek and kisses it. Perrie’s lips hitch against his skin, dragging under his cheekbone for the final millimeters of his face and Louis feels his lips tugging toward hers and then he sees her lips in plain view and his head is following and then he hears Niall say, “What the fuck?” that he recalls where he is. 

In his periphery, he can see everyone staring, including Zayn and Eleanor. Then he feels it rising as hard as he’s trying to choke it back down. 

“I’m not Zayn, love. Did you try to kiss me,” loud enough for everyone to hear.  

The room’s shift in mood is palpable. Louis thinks it might have to do with the air disturbance from the mass of turning heads that look at them. He notices he still has his arms in the small of her back and she is still touching his shoulders, frozen the both of them, with the shock that he has done this. He unfolds himself from her and steps back.  

If Louis was a real body language expert, who could read essays of motivation into people’s stances, or their the set of their mouths, he would wager that Perrie’s mind is racing with ways to murder him, and other ways to dispose of the body. But she gains control of her face in a split second, opting for Bambi-wide eyes. 

“W-what?” she stutters. “I wasn’t…You moved your face…” 

Louis smiles sadly at her, as she struggles to put together another excuse. It’s not unlike holding her head underwater, to save himself. But if it’s what he has to do in order to keep himself afloat, then he would hold her down even longer. 

Eleanor is approaching them, eyes clearly trained on Perrie, while Zayn puts his arm over her shoulders. If it is in response to Eleanor or the kiss that never was, Louis isn’t sure. 

“Okay, lads, let’s go!” a stage manager yells, clearing the mist of the awkwardness. 

“Bye, babe,” he says, pecking Eleanor quickly on the lips. She moves toward the handler who will usher her to the VIP section, locks of her long brown hair trailing after her. 

He turns around to say something to clear the air but Zayn scoops Perrie in his arms for a long kiss. Louis should turn away, but he watches them, how Zayn holds her arse to press her into him, how Perrie puts her hands on both sides of his face as she kisses him. The contours of her lips come back to him, then, and a phantom taste of that lip gunk the first time they had ever kissed. 

As though she can sense him gawping, Perrie’s eyes pops open. She kisses Zayn even harder, frowning into it as she stares back at Louis. Then she shuts her eyes one final time. 

“Now!” the manager yells, more urgently. 

They release each other, Zayn looking hazy when he turns in Louis’ direction and claps his hand on his back. 

“Guess it’s on with it, yeah?” Zayn says. 

“Yep. See you love,” he calls over his shoulder and Zayn walks him out. 

Perrie glares at Louis, saying nothing to him at all. He feels her glare follow him through the door. When they walk on stage, he can still feel it his back, tickling him like an itch that keeps moving every time he thinks he has scratched it gone. He feels it through every song, until his back is sore.

 

 

 

The meet and greet is soggier than usual, fans hugging them with their clinging, damp clothes after the sky had opened up for a few songs. He wishes it could go on forever, so he won’t have to face Perrie or Eleanor again but it winds down, as it always does. Once the last fan sorts their picture, they are led back to their dressing rooms. Mercifully, he doesn’t see Perrie. She is likely waiting inside Zayn’s dressing room like Eleanor. 

He sees her when he enters, her back turned to the door, fingertips tapping at something on her phone. He grabs her by the waist and kisses her neck through the draped fall of her hair, as she whispers, “Hello, there.” 

“Hi, gorgeous,” he says. She turns her neck so he can kiss her properly, on the mouth. He finds himself kissing her with the same hesitating sweetness he used when they were first getting to know each other and she had seemed so very far from his league. 

“How was it?” 

“Same old story,” he says. 

She nods and he releases her, eager to change out of his sweaty, rained-upon clothes. 

“Did she try to kiss you?” Eleanor asks him. She says it with forced irreverence, though he feels her waiting for his answer like it is important. 

“Just a peck on the cheek,” he says, stripping off his shirt and tossing it to the floor. 

“Okay.” 

“It wasn’t anything full on. She wouldn’t do that,” Louis says, feeling compelled to defend Perrie, the least he can do after he sold her out in front of everyone. 

“Okay,” Eleanor says again. She crosses an arm over her waist and brushes her forearm. 

When his shirt is situated, he looks at her, working on unbuttoning his trousers. She isn’t particularly pensive her expression looks like she is far away from his dressing room. Then she shakes her head, lips curling to the right side when he pulls his jeans down and steps out of them. 

“So…” she says as she walks to him. She presses the front of her body close to his back. He turns his around, and her hands slide over his hips, hands falling forward to his cock. 

“So,” he parrots, as she cups him, through his boxer briefs. 

“How long until we’re expected out of here?”

While the promise is tempting, and he is getting harder by the second as she keeps massaging him, he thinks of facing Perrie again in the vans back to the hotel and bending over Eleanor doesn’t seem as appealing. 

“They’ll call us out in a few minutes,” he admits. 

“That’s more than enough time,” she whispers, her breath tickling the shell of his ear. 

“Wait ‘til the hotel, babe,” he promises. “We’ll have more time and we can go slow enough for me to lick every last part of his.” 

He reaches his arm behind him, gropes at her clit through her flimsy shorts. Her breathing gets tight on his ear and he knows he has won, for now.

 

 

 

Managers are even quicker than anticipated in roping the lads into the vans. Harry and Niall go off in a van for their hotel while the rest of the lads and Perrie and Eleanor ride together. 

Louis squeezes in after Eleanor, Louis putting his arm around her as he sits down, and Liam takes the last seat on the bench. Then Zayn and Perrie pile in afterward on the rear-facing bench, Perrie snuggling into his side. She hadn’t seemed out of sorts when he saw her again, smiling and bringing up a comment he had said during the show to laugh about it. He felt like the worst was over as he stares at her now. 

“’M ready for bed,” Liam says, closing his eyes and putting his head on the window, after a bodyguard slides the door shut on them. The van starts away from the venue. 

“Me too,” Zayn says, dropping his head so that his nose touches Perrie’s hair. He looks ready to sleep on her. 

“I hope you aren’t just yet,” she says, giggling. Louis shouldn’t notice the change in her face when she says it, but he does. She is hinting at fucking, for everyone to know in this van. 

Zayn moves his face down to give her a kiss and the air gets sucked out when Louis sees that pleased smile on his face, anticipating their fuck. Perrie glances at him at the kiss’ conclusion.  

Louis kisses Eleanor because two can play that game. It’s a deep kiss, longer than what he would be comfortable with in public but it says everything he needs it to say. Eleanor is gasping slightly when he ends it, lips parted, eyes swaying back and forth over his face. 

His eyes flock to Perrie, to gauge her reaction. She bites her lip. Then she slides an arm over Zayn’s stomach, smiling secretively to herself, then she starts sliding it downward. Zayn raises his eyebrows but he doesn’t say anything to put her hand off. 

Louis can’t bear to look at this and kisses Eleanor again, easing her mouth open as quickly as he can stroke his tongue over hers. She hesitates and he knows he is pushing her too far in public but he will not sit and watch Perrie tease him like this. 

He opens one eye as he keeps kissing Eleanor and wishes he hadn’t. Perrie has arched her neck so Zayn can kiss it, her chin falling against his hair as she emits the softest of sighs. She opens her own eyes after a beat, looking at straight at him and the corners of her lips turn upward. 

Louis turns back to Eleanor going in for another long kiss, perhaps a grope or two but she shies away from him and toward the window. “Not here,” she mutters and he can feel how uncomfortable she is, how she shrinks from him. 

He kisses her cheek, groaning, “Yeah.” 

Perrie has watched the whole thing, or at least, he thinks she has because one eye is still trained on him and Eleanor. 

Liam stirs beside him, waking up from the doze he had dropped off into. He shakes his head and looks across the way at Zayn still putting his mouth all over Perrie like they aren’t alone.  

“Whoa,” Liam says. 

“Yeah. I had no idea this ride came with a complimentary live show, myself,” Louis says. 

Zayn chuckles into the crook of her neck and raises a middle finger to him. 

“Maybe we like the audience,” Perrie says, sticking her tongue out at him with crossed eyes. It is an adorable gesture, so it kills him, just as much as her words. 

 They right themselves, nonetheless, pulling their clothes in order but stay snuggled with one another.  

“Don’t subject us to nastiness,” Louis spits out, bitter words each one of them. 

He feels Eleanor look at him and look off. He would reassure her with something, but right now he needs to win this particular battle. 

“We’re done, yeah?” Zayn tells him, curt and clipped, like he’s put off by the insinuation that what they do could be called nastiness. 

The rest of the ride descends into an uneasy quiet.

 

 

 

Eleanor lets him paw off her clothes when they get into his room, but her efforts to get him out of his are dispassionate tugs that he has to help guide lest she knot his clothes. 

“What’s wrong?” 

She undoes his buckle with careful precision, her lazy fingers bumping against his lower abdomen. “You’re weird around her.” 

“Who?” he asks, feigning 

“Perrie.” 

“How d’you mean?” He takes over from her fingers, to finish off the job. 

“You’re sure nothing happened between you two?” she asks. 

“I’m quite sure,” he says. Her eyes squint despite the answer, trying to decipher his answer and TITF syndrome starts to awaken. 

“Why are you so convinced something’s happened between me and her? Are you feeling guilty about something?” 

“Me?” 

“Yes,” Louis says. 

He unbuttons his shorts, slides them off. He pulls her by the waist, close to him, arm roped around the small of her back, his hard cock pushed between their lower stomachs. 

“I wouldn’t ever. I love you.” She puts her arms on his shoulders, her hands making a cage for his neck, while her fingers flitter though the hairs at his nape. 

A dyspeptic wave of TITF flows into his mouth, acidic and sour. 

“You love me or the money?” he says. 

Eleanor freezes. “I don’t need that from you.” 

“I’m so sorry.” 

He threads her fingers into the ends of her hair, running them over his nails, putting them to his nose to smell the spiced sweetness of her shampoo. “I didn’t mean it, babe. I’m an idiot. I know that’s not your bag.” 

She screws up her lips to one side before talking. “You’re a real prick sometimes." 

“I know,” he says, laying her hair flat over his upper lip into a hair moustache. “I can’t tell you how glad I am that you love me in spite of it.” 

She gives him a pitiful half-smile and he tickles the side of her face with her hair but when it fails to cheer her he puts a lock of hair under her nose too. Soon they talk in voices, imitating grizzled old men, complaining of various maladies, until they’re giggling and falling into the bed that swallows them whole.

 

 

 

“I think I want to go round to the shops,” Eleanor says, parting a curtain to gaze down to admire the view of crawling traffic and waves of underdressed pedestrians down below in the soupy heat as she adjusts her skirt.    

“Uhhh,” Louis say to the pillow, too sleep-drunk for consonants. The bed is so comfortable that turning over nestles him again, makes it so easy to drop off into sleep again. 

“Shall I wait for you? Or…?” 

Louis shifts to look at her. “I don’t think I can make it,” he groans. “This bed’s a fucking legend.” 

Eleanor jumps on top of him and they bounce as they kiss. 

“Yeah, it was hard to get out myself earlier,” she says, straddling him. His arms pop out from under the blankets and hold her waist when she goes in for another kiss. He wants to skirt his tongue along hers and raise her skirt in a subtle request for a morning quickie before she dashes off but she breaks the kiss too soon and climbs off of him. 

“Maybe you can meet me?” she asks, walking toward the couch. As she picks up her bag and sets it on her shoulders, Louis thinks of how he had sucked on Perrie’s skin on that couch less than a day ago and his morning hardness gets more intense. 

“Yeah babe. I’ll text you, if you’re still out.” 

“Fab. Bye! I love you!” she calls as she goes through the door.

 

 

 

Louis jerks off after she is gone, eyes closed, thinking of only Eleanor, how she tasted after the show, comfortable where Perrie was not. Coming feels like a victory, only thoughts of Eleanor mingled with the typical, faceless girls in his daydreams, bringing him off. 

After a cursory clean up, he considers breakfast, lunch, whatever it is at this time, and looks at the room service menu. Nothing jumps out and he orders the thing he feels he could tolerate best. 

He almost falls off asleep again, waiting for his food with the television on low in the background, until he hears the sound of feet and the scrape of sliding plates and squeaking wheels beyond his door. He can hear a hesitance and then the feet pad off again and he remembers the do not disturb, under any circumstances clause managers have given hotels. 

Louis gets out of bed and opens the door, a particularly grumbled clenching of his stomach belying just how hungry he is. The cart at his door holds a single covered platter with his food, a kettle with numerous tea bags and an assortment with a delicate flower set in a thin vase in the upper left hand side of the large tray. Louis fingers the napkin and its origami folding that swaddles his silverware like a newborn. It is all so finely constructed that Louis feels awkward ruining it, but his stomach gurgles all the fortification he needs.  He pulls the handle of the cart toward him into the room, looking up from the food and sees her. 

She is down the hall, pulling a food cart into their room, clutching the ends of a towel in her hand, her hair darkened by the water hanging down in stringy sections over her shoulders. She turns her head and Louis stares at the cart’s handle until he is safely in his room and the door is shut, like it will make him invisible.

 

 

 

The jam is overly seedy and he’ll need a decent brushing to get it all out of his teeth but Louis mourns the last bite of bread nonetheless, with the deliciously tart and sweet spread. He licks his fingers as he flips through the channels, through men with cartoonish Southern American accents hocking power tools, through highlights of all the sports he doesn’t quite understand or care about, through gaggles of women perched on couches babbling about current events. He hears a card in the door, the beep that it has been opened by the right key and glances at the time. He hasn’t expected Eleanor back so soon. 

It takes him a moment to realize that Perrie stands in the room, the concept too absurd after everything for him to process, but her voice confirms her presence. 

“Oh God!” she says. “Wrong room again! I’ve gone mad! I must have taken the wrong key! I’m so sorry!” 

She flails dramatically in a circle that Louis would find charmingly comical if he wasn’t so worried that Eleanor would make an early return to the room to find him in another compromising situation with her. 

In the midst of Perrie’s flailing he notices the way her eyes scan the room, her neck craning a bit too much every direction. 

“She’s not here,” he says.  

“What are you doing in here? How the bloody hell did you get in?” Louis says as he shoots up in bed. He strangely begins to feel self-conscious about crumbs sprinkled over his lips and torso, and he swats at himself. 

She holds up the keycard. “I still have this from the other day.” 

“Okay cool. Drop it off downstairs and get out.” 

“You’re being awfully rude, Louis,” she clucks, putting the card back in her high-waist shorts. 

“Do you want to get caught?” 

“D’you know I should be asking you the same question after yesterday. Are you trying to hang me out to dry?” 

Louis shakes his head. He thinks he must look terrified because she says, “He’s in the shower. Shouldn’t be out for a little while yet.” 

“So why’re you here? Eleanor could come back any time now.” 

She stalks toward his bed, finger pointed, indignation rolling off of her in waves. Louis sits up, knowing this discussion will require full attention. “I’m trying to find out you pulled that whole stunt yesterday.” 

Louis snorts. “Which one?” 

“Oh don’t give me that, you know which one. Telling everyone I was trying to snog you.” 

“Weren’t you?” Louis teases, acidly. 

“Why did you do that? In plain sight? I wasn’t trying to kiss you. I was just—“ 

He cuts her off with his lips, pulling her down over him. Her hands settle on either side of him, caging him underneath, while his hands cradle her head. 

“You were what, love?” he asks miserably when he finds the strength to break away from her mouth. 

“I was just…trying to kiss you?” she says, one eye squinting as her eyebrow rises over the other. 

“Thought so,” he whispers. 

She dives into his face, kissing him feverishly. 

“Does he know you’re here?” 

“He’s in the shower. He’ll be in there a while,” she says, and they both share a laugh, Zayn’s grooming a storied process. 

“Where’s she gone off to?” 

“Shopping,” he says, sloping a finger down the bridge of her nose and tapping the end of it. He stares at her nose after he has done it, unsettled by the fond way he’s playing with her though she isn’t his. He flicks her nose ring in retaliation. 

“Ah! What the fuck?” 

Louis shrugs. Perrie lowers her torso onto his so they are flat against one another, staring at each other while his cock gets harder by the second, imagining another go with her, here, in a proper bed, licking the skin where her crop top and shorts don’t quite meet.   

“You know, you’re almost attractive at this angle. I can see why she’d be fooled.” 

Louis grunts and flips them over. 

“Same can’t be said for you,” Louis says. “Still can’t fathom what he sees in you.” 

She opens her mouth wide in shock and all he can think of is what her mouth might feel like enveloping his cock. 

“You’re such a dickhead!” 

Louis kisses her and bears his hips down against hers as their lips meet, his cock fully at the ready. He pulls at the zipper that holds the front of her top together, but it snags on the fabric, opening it halfway. 

“This is the worst wardrobe malfunction, ever,” he says and sits up to attend to the matter. Perrie follows him up, trying her own hand at the zipper but it is immobile in the face of her best yanks. 

“Let me try,” he says, holding the sides together at the top, fingers grazing the top of her breasts and jiggles the zipper. The snag remains. “You’ve got to be bloody kidding me.” 

Perrie tries again, squeezing the two sides together, then attempting to work one side out of it when that fails, but it is stubborn.

Louis watches her hands struggle, the creases in her forehead deepening with every successive failure, the way her tits bounce as she struggles to free them, he thinks of how Eleanor stared at herself in a fitting room mirror, her arms fidgeting over her a gold zipper in some black dress she had had to try on. She had poked her head through the side of the curtain and asked Louis in to help her moments ago but he had been just as prevented from bringing it all the way up to the nape of her neck. No matter how much they unzipped and zipped, the metal would snag in the same place, just under her shoulder blades.

They had laughed at their efforts but the way Eleanor looked with the top of the dress coming down around her in the mirror had made him, nuzzle her neck and then they had ended up fooling around in the dressing room until a shy sales girl awkwardly asked if they needed any assistance. 

“I’d never considered a third, but I’d be game,” he had called, and Eleanor had playfully smacked his chest. 

Now she might be struggling with another zipper, unaware of what is going on back at her hotel room, and he wouldn’t be there to offer help, too busy with another girl underneath him. 

“You had better go, love.” 

“What?” Perrie asks, looking up from her shirt. 

“This is getting ridiculous. It’s bad enough it happened once.”

Perrie’s hands stop moving and he knows she is in agreement even if she doesn’t know it yet. 

Louis rolls off completely and stands up. “Quick, babe, he might get out soon.” 

She smiles, vacantly. “Yeah. Right. He doesn’t deserve this. It’s shit.” 

“Very,” he says. 

“But my shirt?” she says. 

Louis glances where the zipper snags, off its track devouring the sides of the left side of it, open just a centimeter too low that if anyone were to see her exiting his room with it, might start asking questions. 

“Wait a second.” 

He goes to the dresser, opens the top drawer where two shirts lay in a twisted heap. He pulls a black one with yellow writing that when he straightens it out, Zayn’s Nirvana t-shirt. He shoves it into her hands. 

“This is his. He doesn’t know I borrowed it. If you wear it back he’ll just think you took it and it won’t look as obvious that we—“ 

She takes it. “Great. Shut up and help me out of this.” 

“I’d rather eat my arm.” 

“Please,” she says. 

With their hands on either sides of the shirt, they yank the two sides after a count of three. Their joint force sends the zipper flying off the top, the sides flapping open and Louis gets another eyeful that nearly dissolves his tenuous sense of control. 

Perrie puts the other shirt over quickly and hurries to the door. 

“You’re not going to maul me at the door again, are you?” she teases. 

“Don’t tempt me. But no. I’ll leave that to your boyfriend.” 

“This is over, fully, right? We can’t ever again.” 

He nods though her words sound discouragingly final. “Has to be. For real this time.” 

“Good,” Perrie says, so high-pitched that Louis wonders whom it is that she is trying to convince.   

“Now go.” 

She doesn’t stall at the door this time and leaves immediately. Louis waits for the door to click closed before he picks up her shirt, carelessly tossed to the floor, and goes to the chair. He relieves his aching cock out of his pants and jerks himself hard and fast, holding her shirt in his hands. When he comes, he thinks of how he would have put one of her legs over his shoulder and fucked her like every thrust would make her leave Zayn behind.

 

 

 

The last New York show goes off without any libidinous hitches before they hit the stage. Louis keeps at least three body lengths from Perrie at all times and she does the same, the faintest of cordialities the only things they allow each other. With the show’s conclusion, the excitement backstage among them builds for their short break. 

“Plane’s off tomorrow morning, eight AM sharp,” a tour manager calls. 

“For everyone except you,” Alex snivels at Harry. “Your fucking charade isn’t over yet.” 

“I know,” Harry drawls and Louis nearly feels bad for him with the crowds that have accosted him. Harry has taken it in stride so far, and Louis feels nothing but thankful that someone like him is in this band to take the focus from the rest of the band. 

Zayn sneaks a glance at Harry that Louis notices and his tight look when Alex brings up Harry’s paparazzi agreement. Louis remembers the fragments of that unfinished conversation and wonders again, what transpired between them that Zayn swore was more than a quick fuck that unfortunately got recorded. 

Eleanor tickles his forearm with the tips of her fingers as they hold hands amidst all of the chaos of the show’s dissembling. 

“Ready to head back?” he asks her. 

“Definitely,” she whispers as she leans into his ear. “I want to show you what I got shopping.” 

She shakes her bag to indicate the things she has gotten. She had spent all day at the shops that she had to meet him directly at the venue. Louis turns his head slowly, eyebrows lifted high. Eleanor smiles coyly. He thinks of hundreds of clothing options, all tiny, threadbare things that would leave parts of her barely concealed, diaphanous fabrics going shadowy over her nipples and then a black top, slung over a dresser. His mind circles back to that top, picking it up and enfolding Eleanor in but when his mind goes to zip it, the thing is busted. 

“You want to go back already?” Louis asks her breathlessly, his mind reeling with hundreds of ways to keep her from the hotel room until he could find a suitable way to get in his room and throw Perrie’s shirt out the window, flush it down the toilet, light it on fire, anything. 

Eleanor’s smile deepens. 

“Yeah.” 

“You don’t want to get a drink or something?” he asks. “Celebrate the break?” 

She squints at him. “No. We have an early morning, right?” 

“Yeah but we could sleep on the plane,” he says so quickly he has to repeat himself when she says, “What?” 

“You know, take advantage while we’re here.” 

She frowns. “I’d still have to watch. I can’t drink here remember? We can just get room service, instead, if you want something.” 

Louis curls his lips into his mouth and bites down on them, while managing a smile and hums, “Uh-huh.” 

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Perrie on Zayn’s lap, relaxing her back against his chest while he whispers something in her ear.   

He considers a text but a vision of her pulling out her phone and with Zayn’s eyes watching the screen light up with his name and a vague question about a forgotten garment sounds like it might end in red, wet eyes and misery. 

“Yeah, let’s go back,” Louis says, quietly.

 

 

 

Liam takes a van back with Harry and Niall, though it will take him longer to get back to his hotel because it has to drop Harry and Niall off first. He doesn’t budge on his position even when Zayn and Louis insist he should ride back with them and call his decision mad. 

“I think it’s better this way,” he says. “Got a fair bit weird last night.” 

“What do you mean ‘weird’?” Zayn asks. 

“With you and the girls. Weird.” 

“It didn’t. You were asleep the entire time,” Louis snaps, calmly leveling a gaze at Liam that he hopes means “shut the fuck up.” 

Liam comprehends. “Sure. But I think I’m going to ride with them anyway.” 

“Come on,” Zayn says but Liam stays firm in his refusal. 

If Louis could kiss Liam on the mouth for keeping his mouth shut he would, but he says, “Suit yourself,” and turns away. 

There is more room inside of the car with Liam gone but Louis’ stress bears down on every square inch of his body with wounding strength. 

Eleanor lays the bag on her lap and shakes her thighs up and down at him. She sneaks a soft giggle when he looks over at it, though he is sure his face has given her any indication he gives a fuck. Whatever it is, she is dying to show him, but he is too concerned with properly choosing his words. 

“So is everyone packed and squared away?” he asks as the van starts toward the hotel. 

Zayn and Perrie look over at him. 

“For home?” Zayn asks. “I didn’t even unpack in the first place.” 

“Yeah, just stealing other people’s clothes,” Louis says, emphasizing the last three words, as he looks at Perrie. 

She looks back, placidly, no flicker of his subtext in her eyes. 

“I can’t leave anything lying around. On the floor. On chairs. Or anything,” he goes on. 

Zayn shrugs and nods, the left side of his lips craning upward. Perrie is as uncomprehending as before, eyelids hooding slightly as though he’s boring her. 

“Even if it should have been binned ages ago, Zayn will grab it.” 

No change. 

“Even if it was black and showed off his incredibly fucking sexy belly.” 

Fucking TITF. 

Zayn snorts but Perrie plays with her bracelets absently. 

“Even if its zipper was busted.” 

“We get it,” Eleanor says, as he sees Perrie blink once, slowly, then turn her large eyes to him. 

“I’m just saying, he would take it if it was just lying around your hotel room, over a chair.” 

He can feel Perrie’s reaction though he can’t see it, turned to Eleanor this way. She shifts in her seat and he hears Zayn say in a low voice, “You okay, babe?” 

“Yeah,” she says. 

The rest of the ride is a mute affair and when the van cuts the engine in the hotel garage the silence is deafening. Perrie scampers out first, followed by Zayn and she skips past other cars the entrance as though nothing she realized earlier mattes anymore. Louis still feels as though he is a pallbearer in a funeral procession. 

Eleanor squeezes his hand when they go through the door to the elevator bank while Perrie murmurs something in Zayn’s ear that makes his mouth pop open. For a horrible moment, Louis thinks she has told him about her shirt and expects Zayn to turn to him with an inquisition but his stupid, distant smile kills those fears. When the elevator doors shut them in and begins the ascent, Louis creates the only diversion he knows he can. 

He pushes the button for the bar at the very top of the hotel. 

“Come on, one pint?” Louis says to Eleanor’s audible bristling. 

“But…?” She holds up the bag. “Can’t we stop off at the room first?” 

“A quick pint, then we’ll go back, promise” he says and he hopes with all his soul that Perrie is hearing this and planning to use her keycard to get back into the room, swipe her shirt and leave before they set foot in the room again. 

Eleanor sighs and Louis’ breathing eases with the promise of having won this round for now. Perrie eyes Louis and gives him the slightest of nods. If he is lucky, it just might work out.

 

 

 

Louis extends one pint into three, not completely trusting Perrie to be quick enough to grab her shirt and give Zayn a good enough excuse during the duration of one drink. He does his best to keep her engaged with stupid, judgmental observations of the other people in the restaurant. A man with a comically hideous toupee grabs Louis’ attention and he spirals into a tangent about the peculiar resemblance to someone who has glued a portion of the beige rug from their room to his head. Eleanor indulges him but gazes at the bag that she has set up on a chair next to her, making suggestive gazes toward it. He ignores her and finds another patron to make a mediocre wisecrack. 

Eleanor’s face grows more bored with every sip he takes but by the time he is well into his second pint, she joins him, ordering her own beer. Her attitude and her positioning go languid by the time finishes it, laughing more easily at his observations, placing her hand on his thigh, loosening up so much that he loosens too and thinks that this might turn out well. 

In the elevator, after Louis can’t disregard her racy quips that follow every comment he makes to her and suggests they get back to the room, Eleanor snuggles against his neck, the tip of her nose tracing patterns as she kisses him there. He paws at her breasts through her shirt. Walking down the hall from the elevator bank is a series of fumbling gropes and tripping legs, unable to keep their hands away from each other. She slides her keycard before he does because he’s too concerned with trying to get one of her tits free, stealing glances around the floor to confirm their privacy. It feels so right with her like this, that all thoughts of others—one other, Perrie—are put out of his head. 

They stumble into the room, Eleanor throwing her bag to the ground, tripping both of them up momentarily but then they are back in each other’s arms, at war with the others’ clothes. Louis glances at the chair in the corner of the room, and the shirt is gone. His relief spurs him on to happily to finish getting Eleanor’s clothes off. 

She goes to the bed when Louis has her out of her shirt and he follows, clinging to her like a magnet. Three tugs and one ripped condom wrapper later, he is sinking into her both of them sighing into it. They flip over and Eleanor straddles over him, fucking herself on him, her tits bouncing as she works his cock in and out of her.  

Louis looks over at a flash of something that catches his eye and his breath catches. He sees her, standing in the bathroom doorway, hands clutching that fucking black top. He tells his brain to fuck off and focuses on what he is doing with his hips and hands, clutching at Eleanor’s waist so he can fuck her from below. He throws an arm over his eyes, because he cannot believe this is happening. Here, right now, with Eleanor on top of him. She can’t be. 

Eleanor stops her movements and pulls his arm off of his eyes. “I want you to look at me,” she pants. 

He nods and stares into her eyes, watches how she goes far away into herself when she starts moving on him. Her head goes back, exposing a long vertical section of her neck and Louis dares to make another glance toward the bathroom. 

Perrie still stands exactly in that spot, flaring her nostrils and baring her teeth, while her eyes take it all in. It is happening. She puts her hands out in front of her and shakes them once, as if to say, “What do we do now?” 

Louis snaps his attention back to Eleanor who seems to have caught onto him staring over to the side. She starts to turn her head but Louis flips them so that Eleanor’s back hits the bed wit his body over hers, his chest hiding the bathroom and Perrie, from her view. He kisses her while he repositions himself back inside of her and thrusts into her so hard, he catches her groan with his mouth. 

Eleanor wraps her legs around his waist while he fucks her at this new angle, her breath getting shorter and more ragged like his. But while she edges toward her a tremoring end, he is edging toward thought-disintegrating panic. He looks over his shoulder, judging he is safe to do so with Eleanor’s eyes slammed shut and her hand in between them, desperate to get over the edge. 

He nearly loses it at the sight. Perrie remains at the door watching them, cupping her free hand between her legs and rubbing herself slowly. The fear is still there in her eyes, but her parted lips tell him, on some level, that this show she has inadvertently found herself being made privy to turns her on. He wonders what this must look like to her, watching him fuck someone who isn’t her, the only person he should be fucking. Is she jealous? Is she imagining herself in Eleanor’s place? Or does she want to join, and lick at Eleanor’s tightened nipples as they both work her until she’s shuddering and sobbing at it the sensation? 

He moans, “Fucking hell,” as Eleanor grinds back against his thrusts, her little way of letting him know she’s close, her body finding any means to keep the rhythm going. 

Perrie is touching herself without shame, lips parted, her arm crossing over her torso, making the slightest of movements and Louis feels his heart start to combust into a million smoldering pieces as he watches how this affects Perrie. He finds himself pushing himself harder into Eleanor, while she tightens up above him, with her hands digging into his thighs for support nearly about to lose it. 

He is thankful that Eleanor is too caught up in her own end to notice how Louis can’t turn away from her in the bathroom, or how when he finally closes his eyes to get to the final bit, it’s Perrie he is thinking about. It’s Perrie who he wants to see him like this and it’s Perrie that he wants to show off, let her envision herself in Eleanor’s place. 

Perrie’s eyes close, then, though her hand doesn’t stop moving and that is what does it for Louis, clutching Eleanor’s thighs and snapping into her one last time then shuddering out of her as he stares at Perrie. Eleanor meets him at the end a minute later, her fingers where their pelvises meet, pushing her to the end. Her chest falls forward onto Louis’, convulsing with the last waves of it. 

Perrie disappears steps backwards into the depths of the bathroom and though his body barely feels under his control, so drained he is from this last show, he rolls Eleanor off of him and staggers into the bathroom. 

Louis closes the door behind him and Perrie walks herself back against the sink, looking dazed and frightened, like she doesn’t know what he intends to do. He nearly tells her he isn’t sure either. Her arm still crosses over her stomach, hand swallowed by her shorts. 

He pulls her hand out and sticks her fingers into his mouth while his hand plunges into the shorts to replace them. He tastes her on her fingers and as he moves his against her clit, rubbing her quickly. 

Perrie clutches at his sweaty back as his right hand works over her clit, rubbing back and forth over her quickly. His contracted bicep shakes as he picks up even speed. Her knees buckle and he steadies her, slowing her descent to the bright white tile, all the while never stopping his hand 

“That’s it,” she whimpers as they hit the floor. “That’s it. That’s it. Don’t stop.” 

He goes even faster at that, his slippery fingers losing rhythm with how much wetter she gets, watching her face act out all the declarations of how good it feels. Her panting stops and then she spasms, hips jerking up, back arching, brows knitted in a sweetly sexy frown as she comes. 

The door creaks as it opens, brushing the soles of his feet as it goes by, Perrie still shuddering in his arms. Louis turns to look over his shoulder at her while Perrie’s breath puffs into his chest. 

Eleanor’s eyes calmly trace up the length of both of their woven legs on the tile with one hand against the door. 

When she meets his eyes, Louis weighs the pros and cons of crawling to the toilet and bashing his head against it, blood and bits of brain smattering the unblemished porcelain, all so he can escape from this hell. 


End file.
